Managing string encodings

One of the primary innovations in the version 2.07 is the possibility of changing the encoding of the source and the translation for any string. The strings table has adopted two new columns: Original Encoding and Target Encoding. When creating a new project or adding a file, the application detects the encoding automatically. You can set a special, <Default> encoding value for a translation. In this case, when creating localized files, the encoding will be selected automatically depending on the translation language and encoding of the original string. The encoding being used is displayed in the parentheses after the <Default> value.

You can change the encoding by double-clicking on the cell in the Original Encoding and Target Encoding columns. To change the encoding for several strings at once, select those strings and then select the Edit>Encoding… item on the context menu. That will open the encoding selection dialog.

The encoding selection dialog allows not merely setting the encoding type, but also checking the validity of the character conversion with the selected encoding. By default, Encoding list item in the dialog has focus. So, you can start selecting the encoding by rolling the mouse wheel. You can also use the encoding suggested by the auto-detector – the Apply button. The result of the character conversion appears on the preview list. Each string has an icon that indicates the conversion result for the string. The description of the error can be obtained in the popup hint by placing the mouse pointer over the string.

You can also change the encoding with the property inspector – the Encoding property. The original strings too have the read-only property, OriginalEncoding. This property contains the automatically detected encoding value used when extracting the resources of the file.

Hard-coded Delphi/C++Builder 2009 strings store the encoding value right in the string data in the application code. In some cases, it can mismatch the real encoding of the string. For example, if a string contains XML data, the real encoding of the string is specified in the XML header. To prevent the duplicate coding of the localized file for such strings, in the inspector you can set the KeepOriginalEncoding property.