Chinese on MAC is odd in binary

I’ve got some strange behaviour of Xojo on MAC under Chinese. Xojo 2018R4

I’ve got an application that is spending a lot of time talking binary protocol to a serial port. Strings are kept as binary data and accessed with things like:

cmdAcked = MidB(pktData, 1, 1)

to parse the data bytes out of the binary fields.

This all works fine on Win10 in EN and Chinese. No problems. Works fine on Mac in EN but goes badly wrong in Chinese. It almost looks like binary strings copied around are being translated from binary to wide characters on a MAC when the desktop language is not ASCIIish.

Anyone got any clue what this is?

Unfortunately, there are bugs in the Xojo framework which are triggered when the Mac is booted into Asian languages.

<https://xojo.com/issue/53514>
<https://xojo.com/issue/16190>
<https://xojo.com/issue/54638>

You might need to switch over to memory blocks to solve this.

aw, man… Still nothing showing as corrected (although testing team has at least verified the problem) as of 2019R2.

So, given the size of the code involved, I think I’ll have to wait for a version that does fix this (without breaking something else). Works fine on a PC…

If you need to release a macOS version of your app any time soon I think you will have to work around the bugs. I have a feeling they aren’t going to be fixed any time soon.