How to port app from Borland Pascal to FreePascal and Unicode terminal - freepascal

Question

I am trying to port my first app I ever wrote from old Borland Pascal to FreePascal and run it in Linux unicode shell.
Unfortunately, the app uses CRT unit and writes non-standard ASCII graphical characters. So I tried to rewrite statements like these:
gotoxy(2,3); write(#204);
writeln('3. Intro');
to these:
gotoxy(2,3); write('╠');
write('3. Intro', #10);
Two notes:
I use unicode characters directly in code because I did not find out how to write unicode characters via their code.
I used write procedure instead of writeln to make sure that unix line endings will be produced.
But after replacing all non-standard ASCII characters and getting rid of all writeln statements, it became even worse.
Before changes:
After changes:
Why it ends up like this? What I can do better?
After some time here is an update what I found out.
1) I cannot port it
As user #dmsc rightly pointed out, CRT does not support UTF-8. His suggested hack that did not work for me.
2) When you can't port it, emulate environment.
The graphical characters I needed were part of CP-437. There is a program called luit that is made for converting application output from the locale's encoding into UTF-8. Unfortunately this does not work for me. It simple erased the characters:
# Via iconv, everything is OK:
$ printf "top right corner in CP437: \xbf \n" | iconv -f CP437 -t UTF-8
top right corner in CP437: ┐
# But not via luit, that simply omit the character:
$ luit -gr g2 -g2 'CP 437' printf "top right corner in CP437: \xbf \n"
top right corner in CP437:
So my solution is to run gnome-terminal, add and set Hebrew (IBM862) encoding (tutorial here) and enjoy your app!

Answer 1

The CRT unit does not currently works with UTF-8, as it assumes that each character on the screen is exactly one byte, see http://www.freepascal.org/docs-html-3.0.0/rtl/crt/index.html
But, simple applications can be made to work by "tricking" GotoXY to always do a full cursor positioning, by doing:
GotoXY(1,1);
GotoXY(x, y);
To replace all the strings in your source file, you can use recode, in a terminal type:
recode cp437..u8 < original.pas > fixed.pas
Then, you need to replace all the numeric characters (like your #204 example) with the equivalent UTF-8, you can use:
echo -e '\xCC' | recode cp437/..u8
The 'CC' is hexadecimal for 204, and as a result the character '╠' will be printed.