[fpc-pascal] DateToStr locale

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Thu, 2 Nov 2006, Henry Vermaak wrote:

> o.k. i've had a look at the libc source (locale dir).  i understand
> the general gist of things, but it'd take ages to implement in pascal
> if i try and transliterate that.  it's also not very easy to read (due
> to a generous use of defines).  what work has been done on this for
> fpc?  is there any (more readable) documentation on the locale binary
> files?  posix docs?
> 
> to get the time and date format info i'd have to do this:
> 
> (1) get the locale that's being used (LANG environment variable).
> mine gives en_GB.utf8
> (2) open the LC_TIME file that can be found under
> /usr/lib/locale/{locale from (1)}/
> (3) extract the date and time format from this file

Yes, this is the idea.

> 
> sorry it's not more specific, but that's the main idea.  it would
> obviously make sense to implement the whole lot of locale functions.

Indeed. I would expect you to open the correct file, and initialize
all variables from that file.

> i think it's quite fundamental.  will fpc choose to mimic what libc
> does?  

If you mean read the files and initialize the necessary variables,
the answer is yes.

> it'd quite nice to have a single function that queries certain
> variables from certain categories (e.g. LC_MONETARY, LC_TIME,
> LC_NUMERIC).

That can be done too, but since all constants are in 1 file, it makes
more sense to process the file at once.

Michael.