Character and string types

Free Pascal supports several types of characters and strings.

AnsiChar

A variable of type AnsiChar is exactly 1 byte in size, and contains one ASCII character.

a

Reference

• FPC AnsiChar documentation

WideChar

A variable of type WideChar is exactly 2 bytes in size, and contains one Unicode character in UTF-16 encoding.

a

Reference

• FPC WideChar documentation

PChar

A variable of type PChar is basically a pointer to a Char type, but allows additional operations. PChars can be used to access C-style null-terminated strings, e.g. in interaction with certain OS libraries or third-party software.

a

b

c

#0

Reference

• FPC PChar documentation

PWideChar

A variable of type PWideChar is a pointer to a WideChar variable.