Author: Lou Adler

I'm using the Winexec command and trying to use a string as the argument, but 
Winexec takes only a Pchar as its argument. I can't figure out how to put a regular 
string into a Pchar, or how to make a Pchar 'point' to a character string.

Answer:

WinAPI calls can be pretty confusing, huh? Let's say you have a function called 
WinAPICall that takes a PChar as an argument. Here are a couple of ways to make the 
call:

First Method (This will only work for Delphi 2.0 and above, which supports casting):

WinAPICall(PChar(MyStringVal));

Second Method:

1   procedure CallWinApiCall(S: string);
2   var
3     Val: string;
4     pVal: PChar;
5   begin
6     Val := S;
7     {Initialize memory for the PChar}
8     GetMem(pVal, Length(Val));
9   
10    {Copy the contents of Val to PChar}
11    pVal := StrPCopy(pVal, Val);
12    WinAPICall(pVal);
13  
14    {This next step is ABSOLUTELY necessary}
15    FreeMem(pVal, Length(Val));
16  end;


In any case, that should do it for you pretty nicely.