Question

Are there any compiler directives or preprocessor commands that need to be set in a particular way to make Indy return Utf-8 strings rather than truncating them into Ansi strings? The project I’m working on has all kinds of Delphi-mode flags all over it if that matters.

If I directly set the subject line to a UTF-8 string (like below) it displays correctly on the GUI, so utf-8 support is set up correctly and I’m using an appropriate font and all of that good stuff. Subject is declared as Utf8String for clarity in this code.

MailItem.Subject := 'îņŢëŕŃïóЙǟŁ ŜũƥĵεϿד'; //Displays correctly

However, if I pull the same subject line from the header, using Indy to decode it, I get every international character replaced with exactly one question-mark, exactly the number of should-be characters. Looks like it’s converting UTF-8 to ANSI, which is not what I want.

MailItem.Subject := IdCoderHeader.DecodeHeader('=?utf-8?B?w67FhsWiw6vFlcWDw6/Ds9CZx5/FgSDFnMWpxqXEtc61z7/Xkw==?='); //Displays '?????????? ???????'

So what things could be going wrong and/or how can I fix it?

I am using the latest version of Indy10 from Indy’s website, and Lazarus 1.0 on Windows, so I don’t think this is a “my software needs updating” bug, I think it’s probably some sort of configuration issue.

Answer 1

No, there are no compiler flags you can set for that.

Indy uses AnsiString in Delphi prior to D2009, and in FreePascal prior to 3.0. Indy uses UnicodeString in Delphi 2009+ and FreePascal 3.0+. There is no option to change that.

However, in non-Unicode versions of Delphi and FreePascal, in some places of Indy, you can instruct Indy to interpret AnsiString input values as UTF-8, and return UTF-8 encoded AnsiString output. However, DecodeHeader() is not one of those places.