Get all Environment Strings

Problem/Question/Abstract:

Sometimes you want to show the user the current settings on his/her machine. One of the vital information are the Environment Strings. The Windows API gives us an efficient set of funcitons to access these

Answer:

Solve 1:

Actually, it is really easy to access the Windows Environment Strings. The Windows API defines a function called "GetEnvironmentStrings" to return a double-null terminated buffer filled with null terminated strings seperating all environment variables.

The following procedure will takes a string list as parameter and fill it with all environment variables returned. It will parse the buffer string by string, setting a pointer behind every string returned in order to retrieve the next one.

I hope this will help you.

procedure LoadEnvironmentStrings(Strings: TStrings);
var
  AllStrings, CurrentString: PChar;
begin
  AllStrings := GetEnvironmentStrings;
  try
    if AllStrings <> nil then
    begin
      CurrentString := AllStrings;
      while True do
      begin
        Strings.Add(StrPas(CurrentString));
        Inc(CurrentString, Succ(StrLen(CurrentString)));
        if CurrentString[0] = #0 then
          Break;
      end;
    end;
  finally
    FreeEnvironmentStrings(AllStrings);
  end;
end;


Solve 2:

GetEnvStringsList(TStringList(Memo1.Lines));

procedure GetEnvStringsList(EnvStr: TStringList);
var
  PEnv, PCopyEnv: pchar;
begin
  EnvStr.Clear;
  PEnv := GetEnvironmentStrings;
  PCopyEnv := PEnv;
  if PCopyEnv <> nil then
    repeat
      EnvStr.Add(StrPas(PCopyEnv));
      inc(PCopyEnv, StrLen(PCopyEnv) + 1);
    until PCopyEnv^ = #0;
  FreeEnvironmentStrings(PEnv);
  PCopyEnv := nil;
end;