NAME¶

I18N::Langinfo - query locale information

SYNOPSIS¶

  use I18N::Langinfo;

DESCRIPTION¶

The langinfo() function queries various locale information that can be used to localize output and user interfaces. The langinfo() requires one numeric argument that identifies the locale constant to query: if no argument is supplied, $_ is used. The numeric constants appropriate to be used as arguments are exportable from I18N::Langinfo.

The following example will import the langinfo() function itself and three constants to be used as arguments to langinfo(): a constant for the abbreviated first day of the week (the numbering starts from Sunday = 1) and two more constants for the affirmative and negative answers for a yes/no question in the current locale.

    use I18N::Langinfo qw(langinfo ABDAY_1 YESSTR NOSTR);
    my ($abday_1, $yesstr, $nostr) = map { langinfo } qw(ABDAY_1 YESSTR NOSTR);
    print "$abday_1? [$yesstr/$nostr] ";

In other words, in the "C" (or English) locale the above will probably print something like:

    Sun? [yes/no]

but under a French locale

    dim? [oui/non]

The usually available constants are

    ABDAY_1 ABDAY_2 ABDAY_3 ABDAY_4 ABDAY_5 ABDAY_6 ABDAY_7
    ABMON_1 ABMON_2 ABMON_3 ABMON_4 ABMON_5 ABMON_6
    ABMON_7 ABMON_8 ABMON_9 ABMON_10 ABMON_11 ABMON_12
    DAY_1 DAY_2 DAY_3 DAY_4 DAY_5 DAY_6 DAY_7
    MON_1 MON_2 MON_3 MON_4 MON_5 MON_6
    MON_7 MON_8 MON_9 MON_10 MON_11 MON_12

for abbreviated and full length days of the week and months of the year,

    D_T_FMT D_FMT T_FMT

for the date-time, date, and time formats used by the strftime() function (see POSIX)

    AM_STR PM_STR T_FMT_AMPM

for the locales for which it makes sense to have ante meridiem and post meridiem time formats,

    CODESET CRNCYSTR RADIXCHAR

for the character code set being used (such as "ISO8859-1", "cp850", "koi8-r", "sjis", "utf8", etc.), for the currency string, for the radix character used between the integer and the fractional part of decimal numbers (yes, this is redundant with POSIX::localeconv())

    YESSTR YESEXPR NOSTR NOEXPR

for the affirmative and negative responses and expressions, and

    ERA ERA_D_FMT ERA_D_T_FMT ERA_T_FMT

for the Japanese Emperor eras (naturally only defined under Japanese locales).

See your langinfo(3) for more information about the available constants. (Often this means having to look directly at the langinfo.h C header file.)

Note that unfortunately none of the above constants are guaranteed to be available on a particular platform. To be on the safe side you can wrap the import in an eval like this:

    eval {
        require I18N::Langinfo;
        I18N::Langinfo->import(qw(langinfo CODESET));
        $codeset = langinfo(CODESET()); # note the ()
    };
    if (!$@) { ... failed ... }

SEE ALSO¶

perllocale, "localeconv" in POSIX, "setlocale" in POSIX, nl_langinfo(3).

The langinfo() is just a wrapper for the C nl_langinfo() interface.

AUTHOR¶

Jarkko Hietaniemi, <jhi@hut.fi>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE¶

Copyright 2001 by Jarkko Hietaniemi

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.