Delphi strings are encoded internally as UTF-16. There was a big clue in the fact that SizeOf(Char)
is 2.
The reason that all your characters had ordinal in the ASCII range is that UTF-16 extends ASCII in the sense that characters 0 to 127, in the ASCII range, have the same ordinal value in UTF-16. And all your characters are ASCII characters.
That said, you do not need to worry about the internal storage. You simply convert between string and byte array using the TEncoding
class. For instance, to convert to UTF-8 you write:
bytes := TEncoding.UTF8.GetBytes(str);
And in the opposite direction:
str := TEncoding.UTF8.GetString(bytes);
The class supports many other encodings, as described in the documentation. It's not clear from the question which encoding you are need to use. Hopefully you can work the rest out from here.