' FB 1.05.0 Win64

Dim s As String      = "moose"  '' variable length ascii string
Dim f As String  * 5 = "moose"  '' fixed length ascii string (in practice a zero byte is appended)
Dim z As ZString * 6 = "moose"  '' fixed length zero terminated ascii string
Dim w As WString * 6 = "møøse"  '' fixed length zero terminated unicode string

' Variable length strings have a descriptor consisting of 3 Integers (12 bytes on 32 bit, 24 bytes on 64 bit systems)
' In order, the descriptor contains the address of the data, the memory currently used and the memory allocated

' In Windows, WString uses UCS-2 encoding (i.e. 2 bytes per character, surrogates are not supported)
' In Linux,   WString uses UCS-4 encoding (i.e. 4 bytes per character)

' The Len function always returns the length of the string in characters
' The SizeOf function returns the bytes used (by the descriptor in the case of variable length strings)

Print "s : " ; s, "Character Length : "; Len(s), "Byte Length : "; Len(s); "  (data)"
Print "s : " ; s, "Character Length : "; Len(s), "Byte Length : "; SizeOf(s); " (descriptor)"
Print "f : " ; f, "Character Length : "; Len(s), "Byte Length : "; SizeOf(f)
Print "z : " ; z, "Character Length : "; Len(s), "Byte Length : "; SizeOf(z)
Print "w : " ; w, "Character Length : "; Len(s), "Byte Length : "; SizeOf(w)
Print
Sleep