There was a question raised regarding what the new implementation of Unicode support would mean for developers who create Clarion add-on products.  The question was asked:

Does having THREE encoding options mean every 3rd party product will need to include 3 DLL/DLL and 3 LIB/LIB libraries?

And the short answer is NO, no need for that.  Read on for more details.

The three options I showed in a screenshot in this post  new Unicode implementation show the Project Setting encoding options are “ANSI, UTF-8, Unicode”. These project level encoding settings are for the compiler.  The compiler needs to know how to treat string literals.  The following are the rules the compiler uses to determine how to handle string literals:

• If the source file is encoded as ANSI, strings literals without the U specifier before the apostrophe are taken as is. Unicode string literals with U before the apostrophe are converted by the compiler to Unicode using the codepage value set by the pragma define(codepage=>n).
• If the source file has UTF-8 or UTF-16 encoding, Unicode string literals
  are taken as is. ANSI string literals without U before the apostrophe
  are converted by the compiler to ANSI using the codepage value set
  by the pragma define (codepage=>n).
• The Default value for the codepage(when not specified by the pragma define (codepage=>n)) used by the compiler for conversions of ANSI<->Unicode is CP_ACP.