Package: libc6-dev Version: 2.3.2-8 Severity: wishlist In a program I was developing, I had the need to represent time in a localized fashion. Since the program in question deals with start and stop times of television programmes, it makes no sense to clutter the interface by specifying which second the programme starts on.
I attempted to use strftime(), but I could only find %X, which returns the preferred time representation for the current locale, without the date. It returns hours, minutes, and seconds on all locales I tested this on. There is also %R and %r, but for one using them is to ignore any 12/24-hour preference in the locale. (I'm assuming such a property exists.) They also ignore the preferred seperator between the hours and the minutes part. In Swedish, for example, we prefer to seperate hours and minutes with a . -- so the appropriate formatting for Swedish would be "16.45", for example, while %R would return "16:45". I'm not a native speaker of the French language, but I am told they use the convention "16h45" in situations such as this. I'm sure there are many other examples of separator characters. Also, different languages have different conventions for whether leading zeroes should be used before single-digit hours, and whether a 12 hour or a 24 hour convention should be used. For this reason, I suggest that a new format be added that displays the time in a representation suitable for the particular locale, but without seconds. Of course, as with any new feature in libc, the feature can't be used safely without breaking backward-compatibility. Still, it's better to be late than never adding a feature such as this. In the meantime, I have decided to use gettext to allow translators to compose their own format strings in the program I'm developing. -- System Information: Debian Release: testing/unstable Architecture: i386 Kernel: Linux tanya 2.4.20 #1 mån mar 31 19:30:02 CEST 2003 i686 Locale: LANG=sv_SE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=sv_SE.UTF-8 Versions of packages libc6-dev depends on: ii libc6 2.3.2-8 GNU C Library: Shared libraries an -- no debconf information
