[fpc-pascal] DateToStr locale

[Henry Vermaak]

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

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.
i think it's quite fundamental.  will fpc choose to mimic what libc
does?  it'd quite nice to have a single function that queries certain
variables from certain categories (e.g. LC_MONETARY, LC_TIME,
LC_NUMERIC).

i'll see if i can do some more work on this.

thanks
henry

On 01/11/06, Michael Van Canneyt <michael at freepascal.org> wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, 1 Nov 2006, Henry Vermaak wrote:
>
> > hello all
> >
> > i've noticed that DateToStr gives correct results on win32 (regarding
> > locale), but on linux and osx it always gives the date as dd-mm-yyyy.
> > i read somewhere in the archives that there's a problem implementing
> > this due to the need to link to libc or something (hand wavy).  can
> > anyone shed some light on this for me, or does anyone know about a
> > work around?
>
> The locale info on Linux is stored in some files somewhere in /usr/lib/*
> The routines to access these files are in Libc. Since SysUtils should remain
> free from dependencies on the C library, we cannot use it to initialize the
> constants...
>
> I have somewhere a unit that links to C or uses the KDE info to initialize
> the localization constants in SysUtils. If you don't mind linking to C then
> I can send you this.
>
> If you want to make a Pascal version of the localization routines, then
> Please do :-)
>
> Michael.
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