Delphi – ny tools/utility to convert “string” to “AnsiString” in pascal source files

I have no Delphi 2009 here, so I can't check it. But maybe you have to try:

s := PAnsiChar(AnsiString(Application.ExeName));

As gabr already pointed, this is not a very good practice, and you will only use it if you are 100% sure. The string only contains characters that have a direct mapping to the ANSI range.

That's why you should get a warning because you are converting Unicode to ANSI.

Starting in Delphi 2009, String is an alias for UnicodeString, which holds UTF-16 data. An HTML page, on the other hand, is typically encoded using a multi-byte Ansi encoding instead (usually UTF-8 nowadays, but not always). Your current code will only work if the HTML is encoded as UTF-16, which is very rare. You should not be reading the raw HTML bytes into a UnicodeString directly. You need to first download the entire data into a TBytes, RawByteString, TMemoryStream, or other suitable byte container of your choosing, and then perform an Ansi->Unicode conversion afterwards, based on the charset that is specified in the HTTP "Content-Type" response header. You can use the Accept-charset request header to tell the server which charset you prefer the data be sent as, and if the server is not able to use that charset then it should send a 406 Not Acceptable response (though it MIGHT still send a successful response in an unacceptable charset if it chooses to ignore your request header, so you should account for that).

Try something like this:

function GetInetFileAsString(const fileURL: string): string;
const
  C_BufferSize = 1024;
var
  sAppName: string;
  hSession, hURL: HInternet;
  Buffer: array of Byte;
  BufferLen: DWORD;
  strHeader: String;
  strPageContent: TStringStream;
begin
  Result := '';
  SetLength(Buffer, C_BufferSize);
  sAppName := ExtractFileName(Application.ExeName);
  hSession := InternetOpen(PChar(sAppName), INTERNET_OPEN_TYPE_PRECONFIG, nil, nil, 0);
  try
    strHeader := 'Accept-Charset: utf-8'#13#10;
    hURL := InternetOpenURL(hSession, PChar(fileURL), PChar(strHeader), Length(strHeader), 0, 0);
    try
      strPageContent := TStringStream.Create('', TEncoding.UTF8);
      try
        repeat
          if not InternetReadFile(hURL, PByte(Buffer), Length(Buffer), BufferLen) then
            Exit;
          if BufferLen = 0 then
            Break;
          strPageContent.WriteBuffer(PByte(Buffer)^, BufferLen);
        until False;
        Result := strPageContent.DataString;
        // or, use HttpQueryInfo(HTTP_QUERY_CONTENT_TYPE) to get
        // the Content-Type header, parse out its "charset" attribute,
        // and convert strPageContent.Memory to UTF-16 accordingly...
      finally
        strPageContent.Free;
      end;
    finally
      InternetCloseHandle(hURL);
    end
  finally
    InternetCloseHandle(hSession);
  end;
end;