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Re: [Draft] Writing i18n apps with glibc 2.2



Hi Roger, here are some of my thoughts on your draft.

Regards,
Rigel

On Sat, Oct 14, 2000 at 06:06:08PM +1100, Roger So wrote:
> 
> locales; it is now more POSIX compliant. [is it?]  However, as a result,
> the semantics of many library calls have changed.  The following is a

I'm not aware any semantic change of any library call. Could you elobrate?

>  1. Don't use environment variables to determine locale settings.  In
>     particular, do NOT use the value returned by setlocale(3) to
>     determine the current locale's encoding!  Instead, use
>     nl_langinfo(3) for this purpose.

Good point. However I don't think it's glibc 2.2 issue. Actually if you stick
with glibc only this is not a very big issue, because you always know how
the locales are named (well, kind of). It's a serius issue when you want your
program also runs on other unix systems with their native C library. That's
when the naming conventions becomes wild. So if portability is a concern,
nl_langinfo should be used no matter what C library you work with.

>  2. isprint(3) vs. iswprint(3): To test whether a byte is printable, use
>     iswprint(3).  To test whether a character is printable, use
>     isprint(3).  Take 0xA7DA ('我' in Big5) for example: iswprint(0xA7),

No, please don't. You should continue to use isprint to test whether a byte
is printable. The iswprint is only supposed to work with widechar. iswprint
was not available in glibc 2.1.x, also added to glibc2.2 are whole bunch of
isw* functions and widechar I/O functions (such as wprintf). These functions
are long waited, just ask those mutt developers!

>  
> [Anything else?]
> 

Just a small thing. A new LC_CTYPE class "hanzi" was added in glibc 2.2
locale (both zh_CN and zh_TW have it, zh_HK doesn't though). It currently
contains all the unicode unihan characters. I don't know how useful this
is (your comments on this are welcomed). In case some one is interested in
this, here is a sample implementation of "iswhanzi(wchar_t wc)"

#include <wchar.h>
#include <wctype.h>

int iswhanzi(wchar_t wc)
{
  return iswctype (wc, wctype("hanzi"));
}


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