Re: Locale

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Wed, Oct 30, 2002 at 09:42:28AM +0000, Nick Lamb wrote:
> In Excel do sheets / workbooks have a locale of their own?
There is no provision for that at this point, but it is not
inconceivable.  As things stand there is 1 locale for the entire
process.
 
> Gnumeric's input routines, and many of its Excel-clone functions are
> dependent on locale information. What is a mere string on an American PC
> is a date, or a currency value in France or Japan.
It is not quite that bad.
The locale controls the set of default formats.  So the only things
that are effected are string -> value conversions.  When a user in
one locale enters a date, or a currency value we store the value and
the format it was entered with.  Users can reopen the file in other
locales and shold get the same content.  The only differences would
be if they used string conversions explicitly.

eg
    A1="January"
    B1=value(A1&"/1/2002")

That will break if the format being used is not part of the default
set.

> If it's supposed to work this way then some of the test sheets ought to
> say in a heading font 'Test this sheet in locale fr_US.iso-8859-6' or
> whatever is appropriate (example was intentionally unlikely)
As we definte the new file format I'll probably include some locale
information.  Encoding is not required.  Files will always be in
utf8.  However, it would be potentially useful to include the
locale.  It does not help much, given that the locale may not be
available on the destination machine.  However, we'll include it
anyway.