  A recently proposed method based on dispersion theory, that allows to extract
the scattering length of a hadronic two-body system from corresponding
final-state interactions, is generalized to the situation where the Coulomb
interaction is present. The steps required in a concrete practical application
are discussed in detail. In addition a thorough examination of the accuracy of
the proposed method is presented and a comparison is made with results achieved
with other methods like the Jost-function approach based on the effective-range
approximation. Deficiencies of the latter method are pointed out. The
reliability of the dispersion theory method for extracting also the effective
range is investigated.
