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| <h3 class="section">7.6 Accessing Locale Information</h3> |
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| <p>There are several ways to access locale information. The simplest |
| way is to let the C library itself do the work. Several of the |
| functions in this library implicitly access the locale data, and use |
| what information is provided by the currently selected locale. This is |
| how the locale model is meant to work normally. |
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| <p>As an example take the <code>strftime</code> function, which is meant to nicely |
| format date and time information (see <a href="Formatting-Calendar-Time.html#Formatting-Calendar-Time">Formatting Calendar Time</a>). |
| Part of the standard information contained in the <code>LC_TIME</code> |
| category is the names of the months. Instead of requiring the |
| programmer to take care of providing the translations the |
| <code>strftime</code> function does this all by itself. <code>%A</code> |
| in the format string is replaced by the appropriate weekday |
| name of the locale currently selected by <code>LC_TIME</code>. This is an |
| easy example, and wherever possible functions do things automatically |
| in this way. |
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| <p>But there are quite often situations when there is simply no function |
| to perform the task, or it is simply not possible to do the work |
| automatically. For these cases it is necessary to access the |
| information in the locale directly. To do this the C library provides |
| two functions: <code>localeconv</code> and <code>nl_langinfo</code>. The former is |
| part of ISO C<!-- /@w --> and therefore portable, but has a brain-damaged |
| interface. The second is part of the Unix interface and is portable in |
| as far as the system follows the Unix standards. |
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| <li><a accesskey="1" href="The-Lame-Way-to-Locale-Data.html#The-Lame-Way-to-Locale-Data">The Lame Way to Locale Data</a>: ISO C's <code>localeconv</code>. |
| <li><a accesskey="2" href="The-Elegant-and-Fast-Way.html#The-Elegant-and-Fast-Way">The Elegant and Fast Way</a>: X/Open's <code>nl_langinfo</code>. |
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