Question

Are there any wide-string manipulation implementations out there?

function WideUpperCase(const S: WideString): WideString;

function WidePos(Substr: WideString; S: WideString): Integer;

function StringReplaceW(const S, OldPattern, NewPattern: WideString; 
      Flags: TReplaceFlags): WideString;

etc

Answer 1

I generally import the “Microsoft VBScript Regular Expression 5.5” type library and use IRegExp objects.

OP Edit

i like this answer, and i went ahead and wrote a StringReplaceW function using RegEx:

function StringReplaceW(const S, OldPattern, NewPattern: WideString; Flags: TReplaceFlags): WideString;
var
    objRegExp: OleVariant;
    Pattern: WideString;
    i: Integer;
begin
    {
        Convert the OldPattern string into a series of unicode points to match
        \uxxxx\uxxxx\uxxxx

            \uxxxx  Matches the ASCII character expressed by the UNICODE xxxx.
                        "\u00A3" matches "£".
    }
    Pattern := '';
    for i := 1 to Length(OldPattern) do
        Pattern := Pattern+'\u'+IntToHex(Ord(OldPattern[i]), 4);

    objRegExp := CreateOleObject('VBScript.RegExp');
    try
        objRegExp.Pattern := Pattern;
        objRegExp.IgnoreCase := (rfIgnoreCase in Flags);
        objRegExp.Global := (rfReplaceAll in Flags);

        Result := objRegExp.Replace(S, NewPattern);
    finally
        objRegExp := Null;
    end;
end;