OpenEuphoria

Full locale support now in SVN!

• Posted by Jeremy Cowgar <jeremy at c??gar.com> May 05, 2008
• 768 views

Wow, it's finally working! We can now format date/time values, money, numbers
and finally also message translation.

Instead of going with an INI file, I went with the same format that gettext
uses, the po file because there are many nice editors (not text editors but
translation tools) for .po files. There are also text editors for the po format,
as it is a simple text file. So, here's an example program:

---- File: po/en_US.po
# English language file for greeter app
hello Hello
world World
greeting %s, %s!

---- File: po/es_MX.po
# Spanish language file for greeter app
hello Hola
world Mundo
greeting %s, %s!

---- File: greeter.ex

include locale.e as l
include datetime.e as d

d:datetime now
now = d:now()

l:set_po_path("po")
l:set("en_US")
printf(1, "Date: %s\n", {l:datetime("%A, %B %d, %Y", now)})
printf(1, "Average car price: %s\n", {l:money(22652)})
printf(1, "Population: %s\n", {l:number(10000)})
printf(1, l:w("greeting"), {l:w("hello"), l:w("world")})
puts(1, "\n")

l:set("es_MX")
printf(1, "Date: %s\n", {l:datetime("%A, %B %d, %Y", now)})
printf(1, "Average car price: %s\n", {l:money(22652)})
printf(1, "Population: %s\n", {l:number(10000)})
printf(1, l:w("greeting"), {l:w("hello"), l:w("world")})

---- Output:
Date: Sunday, May 04, 2008
Average car price: $22,652.00
Population: 10,000
Hello, World!

Date: domingo, mayo 04, 2008
Average car price: $22,652.00
Population: 10,000
Hola, Mundo!
----

So, that's it. Now, I do have one more problem that many other systems do not
address and maybe they do not because it's a very rare case? The problem is in
the example of Hello, World!. Some languages may say who they are greeting first,
like: World Hello! or something like that. In this situation, our localization
will not work. As it is positional ("%s, %s!").

Any thoughts from someone better at localizing apps than I am?

Oh, I know the date/time, money, number formatting did not change, but it's the
same for English and Spanish... here's output if the locale is changed to de_DE:

Date: Sonntag, Mai 04, 2008
Average car price: 1.020,50 EUR
Population: 10.000

--
Jeremy Cowgar
http://jeremy.cowgar.com