Strings
The Strings component provides services to manipulate character strings.
Strings are classes that handle dynamically sized sequences of characters based on both ASCII (normal 8-bit character type) and Unicode UTF-8 (8-bit character type) and UTF-16/UCS-2 (16-bit character type). They provide editing operations with built-in memory management which make the relative objects easier to use than ordinary character arrays.
The class TCollection_AsciiString supports 8-bit character strings and the class TCollection_ExtendedString - 16-bit character strings. The latter class possesses methods to convert from/to ASCII and UTF-8 strings.
Strings may also be manipulated by handle, and therefore shared, represented by classes TCollection_HAsciiString and TCollection_HExtendedString.