Delphi Ansistrings

I have a case here, I am going to migrate over to delphi 2011 XE from Delphi 7, and to my surprise many components will have problems due to ansistrings, in delphi xe they look like japanese / chinese characters, now the unit I use is a PCSC connector and seem to be discontinued/abandoned from the original developper.

basically what I want is开发者_Python百科 a easy way to read the strings again with as little modification to original code as possible..

also if there are any good tutorials out there on how to makae components ansistring ready for 2009 and newer would help me also

@Plastkort, Delphi >= 2009 is perfectly capable of reading and handling AnsiString. You only get the meaningless characters if you somehow hard-cast ANSI data to Unicode, possibly by hard-casting a pointer to PChar.

If I had to convert someone else's code to Unicode I'd start by searching for PChar, Char and String and specifically looking at places where other types are hard casted to those types. That's because those types changed meaning: In non-Unicode delphi CHAR was 1 byte, now it's 2 bytes.

The conversion itself isn't necessary difficult, you just need to understand the problem you're facing and you need to have good understanding of the code you're converting. And it's a lot of work, especially when dealing with code that did "smart things with strings".

The big change in Delphi (prior to Delphi 2009 I think) is the aliased string types; string, Char, PChar, etc which prios to 2009 were ANSI string types are now all WideChar types.

so

Type   | Delphi 6,7 | Delphi 2009, XE
-------+------------+----------------
string | AnsiString | UnicodeString
char   | AnsiChar   | WideChar
pchar  | PAnsiChar  | PWideChar

The simplest way to migrate from Ansi Delphi to Unicode Delphi is a global search and replace for the aliased string types that replaces them with the explicit 8 bit ANSI equivlents (i.e. replace all string with AnsiString, PChar with PAnsiChar, etc...)

That should get you 90% of the way.

update After reading the comments to my answer and the article referenced by @O.D I think the advice to bite the bullet and go with Unicode is the wiser option.