Question

I would like to make a procedure that take array of shortstring as argument

procedure f(const a, b: Array of shortstring);

I would like to call this with arrays of known length and shortstrings of known length e.g.

var
  A, B: array[1..2] of string[5];
  C, D: array[1..40] of string[12];
begin
  f(A,B);
  f(C,D);
end;

This result in an compiler error E2008 Incompatible types.
Why is that? Can I write a procedure that can take arrays of shortstring (any length of arrays/strings)?

Why use shortstring?

The shortstings are fields in an existing record. There are alot of these record with thousand of shortstrings. In an effort to migrate data from turbo power B-Tree Filer to SQL databases one step is to convert the record to a dataset, and the back to a record, to confirm all fields are converted correctly both directions. I have been using CompareMem on the records to check this, but it does not provide enough information as to which field a conversion error is in. Thus a small program was created, which from the record definition can generate code to compare the two records. It was for this code generator I needed a function to compare shortstrings. It ended up using CompareMem on the shortstrings.

Answer 1

In a similar situation I’ve used the following:

type
  TOpenArrayOfOpenString = record
  strict private
    FSizeOfString: Integer;
    FpStart: PChar;
    FArrayLength: Integer;
    function GetItemPtr(AIndex: Integer): PShortString;
  public
    constructor Init(var AFirstString: Openstring; AArrayLength: Integer);
    function Equals(const AArray: TOpenArrayOfOpenString): Boolean;

    property SizeOfString: Integer read FSizeOfString;
    property pStart: PChar read FpStart;
    property ArrayLength: Integer read FArrayLength;
    property ItemPtrs[AIndex: Integer]: PShortString read GetItemPtr; default;
  end;

{ TOpenArrayOfOpenString }

constructor TOpenArrayOfOpenString.Init(var AFirstString: Openstring; AArrayLength: Integer);
begin
  FSizeOfString := SizeOf(AFirstString);
  FpStart := @AFirstString[0]; // incl. length byte!
  FArrayLength := AArrayLength;
end;

function TOpenArrayOfOpenString.Equals(const AArray: TOpenArrayOfOpenString): Boolean;
begin
  Result := CompareMem(pStart, AArray.pStart, SizeOfString * ArrayLength);
end;

function TOpenArrayOfOpenString.GetItemPtr(AIndex: Integer): PShortString;
begin
  Result := PShortString(pStart + AIndex * SizeOfString);
end;

You could use it like this:

procedure f(const a: TOpenArrayOfOpenString);
var
  i: Integer;
begin
  for i := 0 to Pred(a.ArrayLength) do
    Writeln(a[i]^);
end;

procedure Test;
var
  A: array[1..2] of string[5];
  C: array[1..40] of string[12];
begin
  f(TOpenArrayOfOpenString.Init(A[1], Length(A)));
  f(TOpenArrayOfOpenString.Init(C[1], Length(C)));
end;

It’s not as elegant as a solution built into the language could be and it is a bit hacky as it relies on the fact/hope/… that the strings in the array are laid out contiguously. But it worked for me for some time now.