Re: Best way to format a name string in Folks

[Chris Leonard <cjlhomeaddress gmail com>]

On Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 11:10 AM, Philip Withnall
<philip tecnocode co uk> wrote:
> On Sun, 2012-08-05 at 00:55 -0400, Chris Leonard wrote:
>> My own point of view on this is that I find it frustrating when
>> developers to ask a localizer to do a job that the glibc locale should
>> be capable of addressing all on it's own.  Translating Day and Month
>> names should be banned in PO files :-)
>>
>> There is in fact an entire section in glibc locales called LC_NAME in
>> the glibc locale that has a field for Name format (name_fmt) as
>> described below.  My argument is that develoeprs should leverage the
>> information content of the glibc locale to the greatest extent
>> possible, that is after all the primary purpose of having glibc locale
>> files.
>
> That looks great, but how do I use it from C (or Vala)? The best I can
> find so far is retrieving the translated name_fmt using
>         nl_langinfo (_NL_NAME_NAME_FMT)
> and then implementing the substitution of the field descriptors myself,
> which does not sound like fun at all. Something like strftime() (but for
> names) would be great. I just can't find it.
>
> Thanks,
> Philip

Philip,

I may have to apologize for speaking before investigating the
specifics of LC_NAME.

After looking at these links:

http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Locale-Information.html#Locale-Information

http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/The-Elegant-and-Fast-Way.html#The-Elegant-and-Fast-Way

 I would have to admit that the information in the glibc locale is not
as accessible as I thought it was.  To achieve my idealized notion of
locale data accessibility, it is possible that the X/Open upstream
would need to be modified or an LC_NAME equivalent of strftime()
created as you suggest.

cjl