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ftFixedWideChar

ftFixedWideChar = 38

Example​

function IsFixedUnicodeText(Field: TField): Boolean;
begin
  Result := Field.DataType = ftFixedWideChar;
end;

Usage​

ftFixedWideChar identifies fixed-width Unicode character data whose declared character length and padding rules are supplied by the provider.

Additional Technical Info​

ftFixedWideChar is declaration ordinal 38 of TFieldType. It is the fixed-width member of Delphi's wide-string field family, commonly corresponding to a fixed Unicode database character column.

The installed RTL maps it to TWideStringField and treats it as base ftWideString for compatibility. The field stores Delphi Unicode strings; conversions to ANSI remain potentially lossy. Size normally describes provider-level character capacity rather than a portable byte count. Supplementary Unicode characters, database collation and driver encoding can make code-unit, character and storage-byte counts differ.

Fixed-width providers can return or suppress trailing padding, and comparison behavior can be controlled by the database collation rather than Delphi. Do not trim, normalise Unicode, compare case-insensitively or calculate wire lengths solely from this enum. Apply the explicit source and destination contracts.

Use ftFixedChar only for a genuinely narrow encoded field, ftWideString for variable Unicode text, and ftWideMemo for large Unicode text. Null is independent of an empty or space-filled string.

The example only inspects metadata and was source-reviewed; no Unicode, collation, padding, dataset, database, runtime or image test ran.

External references

Created 2026-07-15