Locale::gettext_dumb(3User Contributed Perl DocumentaLocale::gettext_dumb(3pm)NAMELocale::gettext_dumb - Locale unaware Implementation of Uniforum
Message Translation
SYNOPSIS
use Locale::gettext_dumb (:locale_h :libintl_h);
# Normally, you will not want to include this module directly but this way:
use Locale::Messages;
my $selected = Locale::Messages->select_package ('gettext_dumb');
gettext $msgid;
dgettext $domainname, $msgid;
dcgettext $domainname, $msgid, LC_MESSAGES;
ngettext $msgid, $msgid_plural, $count;
dngettext $domainname, $msgid, $msgid_plural, $count;
dcngettext $domainname, $msgid, $msgid_plural, $count, LC_MESSAGES;
pgettext $msgctxt, $msgid;
dpgettext $domainname, $msgctxt, $msgid;
dcpgettext $domainname, $msgctxt, $msgid, LC_MESSAGES;
npgettext $msgctxt, $msgid, $msgid_plural, $count;
dnpgettext $domainname, $msgctxt, $msgid, $msgid_plural, $count;
dcnpgettext $domainname, $msgctxt, $msgid, $msgid_plural, $count, LC_MESSAGES;
textdomain $domainname;
bindtextdomain $domainname, $directory;
bind_textdomain_codeset $domainname, $encoding;
my $category = LC_CTYPE;
my $category = LC_NUMERIC;
my $category = LC_TIME;
my $category = LC_COLLATE;
my $category = LC_MONETARY;
my $category = LC_MESSAGES;
my $category = LC_ALL;
DESCRIPTION
IMPORTANT! This module is experimental. It may not work as described!
The module Locale::gettext_dumb does exactly the same as
Locale::gettext_xs(3pm) or Locale::gettext_pp(3pm).
While both other modules use POSIX::setlocale() to determine the
currently selected locale, this backend only checks the environment
variables LANGUAGE, LANG, LC_ALL, LC_MESSAGES (in that order), when it
tries to locate a message catalog (a .mo file).
This class was introduced in libintl-perl 1.22.
USAGE
This module should not be used for desktop software or scripts run
locally. Why? If you use a message catalog for example in Danish in
UTF-8 (da_DA.UTF8) but the system locale is set to Russian with KOI8-R
(ru_RU.KOI8-R) you may produce invalid output, either invalid multi-
byte sequences or invalid text, depending on how you look at it.
That will happen, when you mix output from Locale::gettext_pp with
locale-dependent output from the operating system like the contents of
the variable "$!", date and time formatting functions (localtime(),
gmtime(), POSIX::strftime() etc.), number formatting with printf() and
friends, and so on.
A typical usage scenario looks like this:
You have a server application (for example a web application) that is
supposed to display a fixed set of messages in many languages. If you
want to do this with Locale::gettext_xs(3pm) or
Locale::gettext_pp(3pm), you have to install the locale data for all of
those languages. Otherwise, translating the messages will not work.
With Locale::gettext_dumb(3pm) you can relax these requirements, and
display messages for all languages that you have mo files for.
On the other hand, you will soon reach limits with this approach.
Almost any application requires more than bare translation of messages
for localisation. You want to formatted dates and times, you want to
display numbers in the correct formatting for the selected languages,
and you may want to display system error messages ("$!").
In practice, Locale::gettext_dumb(3pm) is still useful in these
scenarios. Your users will have to live with the fact that the
presented output is in different languages resp. for different locales,
when "their" locale is not installed on your system.
More dangerous is mixing output in different character sets but that
can be easily avoided. Simply make sure that Locale::gettext_dump uses
UTF-8 (for example by setting the environment variable OUTPUT_CHARSET
or by calling bind_textdomain_codeset()) and make sure that the system
locale also uses UTF-8, for example "en_US.UTF8". If that fails,
switch to a locale that uses a subset of UTF-8. In practice that will
be US-ASCII, the character set used by the default locale "C" resp.
"POSIX".
Your application will then to a certain extent mix output for different
localisations resp. languages. But this is completely under your
control.
EXAMPLE
See above! Normally you should not use this module! However, let us
assume you have read the warnings. In a web application you would do
something like this:
use Locale::TextDomain qw (com.example.yourapp);
use Locale::Messages qw (nl_putenv LC_ALL bindtextdomain
bind_textdomain_codeset);
use Locale::Util qw (web_set_locale);
use POSIX qw (setlocale);
# First try to switch to the locale requested by the user. If you
# know it you can try to pass it to setlocale like this:
#
# my $hardcoded_locale = 'fr_FR.UTF-8';
# my $success = POSIX::setlocale (LC_ALL, $hardcoded_locale);
#
# However, we try to let libintl-perl do a better job for us:
my $success = web_set_locale $ENV{HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE},
$ENV{HTTP_ACCEPT_CHARSET};
# Note: If your application forces the use of UTF-8 for its output
# you should pass 'UTF-8' as the second argument to web_set_locale
# instead of $ENV{HTTP_ACCEPT_CHARSET}.
if (!$success) {
# Did not work. Switch to the dumb interface of
# Locale::Messages.
Locale::Messages->select_package ('gettext_dumb');
# And try to switch to a default locale:
if (!setlocale (LC_ALL, 'en_US.UTF-8')) {
# Still no luck. Enforce at least US-ASCII:
setlocale (LC_ALL, 'C');
}
bind_textdomain_codeset 'com.example.yourapp', 'utf-8';
}
If your application forces the usage of UTF-8 you should ignore the
environment variable
AUTHOR
Copyright (C) 2002-2013, Guido Flohr <guido@imperia.net>, all rights
reserved. See the source code for details.
This software is contributed to the Perl community by Imperia
(<http://www.imperia.net/>).
SEE ALSOLocale::TextDomain(3pm), Locale::Messages(3pm), Encode(3pm),
perllocale(3pm), POSIX(3pm), perl(1), gettext(1), gettext(3)perl v5.14.2 2013-01-23 Locale::gettext_dumb(3pm)
