> Unfortunately the newer FreePascal/Delphi versions made it all very confusing by adding an encoding field I can clear this up. This change is really useful a

> Unfortunately the newer FreePascal/Delphi versions made it all very confusing by adding an encoding field I can clear this up. This change is really useful and important if you are using strings. A string of bytes has attached metadata saying what it is. Is it ANSI of some sort, or UTF8, or...? Is it a specific encoding, such as Windows-1252? Without that data, all you have are bytes, and you don't know how to interpret them. Thus, RawByteString (bytes); UTF8String (UTF8); and ANSI strings with the encoding, plus UnicodeString which is native Unicode on whichever platform (eg, on Windows it matches Windows UTF16.) This data is essential to convert to and from different string types. I don't know where conversion does "not always" happen - can't think of anywhere offhand. But if you ever run into issues, there are RTL functions for conversion. Check out the TEncoding class: http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/Tokyo/en/System.SysUtils.TEncoding http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/Tokyo/en/System.Sys... > In the past you could just assume all strings are UTF-8 as code style rule. This was an incorrect assumption, because before the encoding metadata was added, you would have been using an AnsiString there, and that, by definition ('Ansi'), is not UTF8. These days, if you have a UTF8 string, you can place it in a UTF8String type. Correctness enforced by libraries is much better than a coding convention that a certain type contains a subtly different payload. That way lies horror. Metadata and strong typing is much safer. -- I do agree with you that Delphi has the best strings :) Copy on write and embedded length both seem a real win, after twenty years of use, not to mention great string twiddling methods. I'm looking at adding string_view support to the strings currently (for C++17 support); one thing it highlights is how much more powerful the inbuilt String types are, and how much string_view is a workaround for a problem in C++'s string design which other string libraries - not just ours, but ours is IMO very good - do not suffer from.