The good old case statement has one big handicap: You can not use it with strings as operators, only integers can be used. With a little tricky procedure, we can use strings as well as integers as operators for a case statement.

Look at this procedure:

function CaseString (const s: string; ci, p: Boolean; 
                     const x: array of string): Integer;
// s  = the string to search for
// ci = when TRUE, the search is case insensitive
// p  = when TRUE, s can be a part of the result string
// x = the possible strings in case statement
var i: Integer;
    s1, s2: string;
begin
  Result:= -1;
  if ci then s1:= AnsiUpperCase(s) else s1:= s;
  for i:= Low (x) to High (x) do begin
    if ci then
      s2:= AnsiUpperCase(x[i])
    else
      s2:= x[i];
    if p then begin
      if Pos (s2, s1) > 0 then begin
        Result:= i;
        Exit;
      end;
    end else begin
      if s1 = s2 then begin
        Result:= i;
        Exit;
      end;
    end;
  end;
end;

In fact we always have only integers in the case, but the function can scan the array of strings and return the index of the element searched for. This is a good example for the use of open arrays. In the parameter x, the possible strings for the case statement are given. For example:

var entry: string;


case CaseString (entry, TRUE, FALSE,
                 ['YES','NO','CANCLE','FORMAT']) of
   0: WriteString ('entry = yes');
   1: WriteString ('entry = no');
   2: WriteString ('entry = cancle');
   3: WriteString ('entry = format');
 end;

parameter x can be a hand typed array or a array build at runtime, or - of course - a stringlist.