Here a nice little code example that you can show to people interested
in character set aware programming to demonstrate how simple properly
written portable code to output a certain character in a
locale-dependent portable way can look like:
-------------------------------------------------------------------
/* Trivial demonstration of how to output a Unicode character (here:
* the euro sign, U+20AC) with ISO C in a portable way. [For Linux,
* make sure you have glibc 2.2 or newer, otherwise you'll only get
* the ASCII fallback.] */
#include <stdio.h>
#include <locale.h>
int main() {
/* Set the locale, such that C's multibyte output routines know,
* which encoding (ISO 8859-1, ISO 8859-15, UTF-8, ASCII, etc.)
* the user wants */
if (!setlocale(LC_CTYPE, "")) {
fprintf(stderr, "Can't set the specified locale! "
"Check LANG, LC_CTYPE, LC_ALL.\n");
return 1;
}
printf("Euro sign: ");
#ifdef __STDC_ISO_10646__
if (printf("%lc", 0x20ac) < 0) /* try C's multibyte output mechanism */
#endif
printf("EUR"); /* if that fails: ASCII fallback */
printf("\n");
return 0;
}
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Compile the above wtest.c and call with
LANG=de_DE ./wtest -> get ISO 8859-1
LANG=de_DE@euro ./wtest -> get ISO 8859-15
LANG=de_DE.UTF-8 ./wtest -> get UTF-8
You'll fully automatically get the encoding that "locale charmap"
reports for the current locale setting.
If you are unfamiliar with C's wide I/O functions, you'll find them
documented in the new ISO C standard
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/volatile/ISO-C-FDIS.1999-04.txt
Markus
--
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
-
Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
