Locale Library

Introduction

In today's globalized world, computer software is commonly sold and used in different countries. Each country represents a specific environment, in which certain aspects, features or behaviour of the software may not produce a desirable user experience. Therefore, modern computer applications need to be designed and adapted to respect various local conventions. Your product – free or commercial – can easily get rejected by users if you fail to do so.

The process of adapting software to the linguistic, cultural and technical requirements of a local market is called localization. This process typically entails:

• translation of the application's user interface to the target language
• translation of the application's documentation and help files to the target language
• adaptation to specific writing conventions such as punctuation, number formatting, date and time format etc.
• use of local units of measurement, currency etc.
• use of language-specific sorting rules
• adaptation of keyboard shortcuts (where mnemonics is desirable to be preserved)
• etc.

In AmigaOS, the Locale Library is the component provided to software developers to help them localize their applications.

Function Reference

The following table gives a brief description of the Locale Library functions. See the SDK/Autodocs for details about each call.

Function	Description
CloseCatalog()	Close a message catalog.
CloseLocale()	Close a locale.
ConvToLower()	Convert a character to lower case.
ConvToUpper()	Convert a character to upper case.
FormatDate()	Generate a date string based on a date formatting template.
FormatString()	Format data into a character stream, assume 16bit-aligned data.
FormatString32()	Format data into a character stream, assume 32bit-aligned data.
GetCatalogStr()	Get a string from a message catalog.
GetLocaleStr()	Get a standard string from a locale.
IsXXXX()	A set of similarly-named functions to determine whether a character is of a certain type.
OpenCatalog()	Open a message catalog.
OpenLocale()	Open a locale.
ParseDate()	Interpret a string according to the date formatting template and convert it into a DateStamp.
StrConvert()	Transform a string according to collation information.
StrnCmp()	Localized string comparison.