Delphi Unicode String Type Stored Directly at its Address

Posted by Andreas Rejbrand on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Andreas Rejbrand
Published on 2010-05-10T21:19:18Z Indexed on 2010/05/10 21:24 UTC
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delphi

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string

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unicode

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shortstring

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memory

I want a string type that is Unicode and that stores the string directly at the adress of the variable, as is the case of the (Ansi-only) ShortString type.

I mean, if I declare a S: ShortString and let S := 'My String', then, at @S, I will find the length of the string (as one byte, so the string cannot contain more than 255 characters) followed by the ANSI-encoded string itself.

What I would like is a Unicode variant of this. That is, I want a string type such that, at @S, I will find a unsigned 32-bit integer containing the length of the string in bytes (or in characters, which is half the number of bytes) followed by the Unicode representation of the string. I have tried WideString, UnicodeString, and RawByteString, but they all appear only to store an adress at @S, and the actual string somewhere else (I guess this has do do with reference counting and such).

I suspect that there is no built-in type to use, and that I have to come up with my own way of storing text the way I want (which actually is fun). Am I right?

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