asPlainText

asPlainText(): String;

The asPlainText method of the StringUtf8 primitive type returns a string containing the US-ASCII characters from the receiving UTF8 string with the non-US-ASCII characters replaced with a character entity escape sequence using an entity name if possible; otherwise a hexadecimal value.

ASCII control characters (excluding carriage returns, line feeds, and tabs) are converted to hexadecimal escape sequences. The ampersand and semicolon characters are converted to & and ; respectively.

The following code example shows the difference between using the asPlainText method and converting to a String value.

vars
    str8: StringUtf8;
begin
    str8 := @"Copyright ©;";
    write str8.asPlainText;              // outputs "Copyright ©;"
    write str8.String;                   // outputs "Copyright ©;"
end;