Dynamic length of PChar's, Pos() searching inside PChar

Procedure Speedbutton1.click(Sender: TOjbect)
var MyPCar: PChar
begin
   PChar:='hi there its a test of 36 characters'#0;
   speedbutton1.caption:='Length is:'+ inttostr(sizeof(PChar));
end;

The results shows a length of 4!. What is this? I wish to know how
long (how many characters) the text is that is stored in the PChar.

Also, I see no Pos() function for PChar's in 16-bit. I wish to search
and replace a substring within a PChar.

Who knows how to do this?

Email me, I reply. Com...@Lottery.powernet.co.uk
Matthew       NB SEE BELOW!

N.B.: To email me, please send your message to this email address:  

Com...@Lottery.powernet.co.uk

That is my correct address. I do not enter my address in the automatic
header of the newsgroup. This helps avoid junk-email from
address-gathering robots.

On Sun, 01 Feb 1998 16:20:24 GMT, in comp.lang.pascal.delphi.misc

I assume you meant to type "MyPCar" in the last two uses of PChar.

The reason is that MyPCar is a pointer, and in Delphi, pointers are 4
bytes long.  You want to find out how long is the string that it
points to.  Use StrLen for that.

I think StrPos does what you want.

Duncan Murdoch

Actually, all that it does is to inconvenience people trying to
respond to you.  The robots can gather your address from the body just
as well as from the headers.  If you want to try to foil them, you
should get a new email address (the one you used has already been
gathered), and then never include it anywhere in any of your messages.

In article <34d495e...@news.power.net.uk>,

SizeOf() gives you the size of the _object_ not its dimension, and the object
size of a  PChar is the 4 bytes the pointer to a PChar takes.

What you want is StrLen() - see "String-Handling Routines (null-terminated)" in
the help file.

You'll also find StrPos() there.

Alan Lloyd
alangll...@aol.com

Matthew schrieb in Nachricht <34d495e...@news.power.net.uk>...

PChar is a pointer to a char. As Pointers are 4 bytes big, the result
is 4. The length of the string is:
StrLen(MyPChar). The Pos() function is for Delphi Strings, not for the
ASCII-Zero delimited type of strings, like C and Windows use. For
PChars (which normally point to ASCIIZ strings), you can use
StrPos(MyPChar, 'there').

Rudy Velthuis