Re: Locale definitions, dots and commas

["Andrew W. Nosenko" <andrew w nosenko gmail com>]

On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 6:09 PM, Carlos Pereira
<jose carlos pereira ist utl pt> wrote:
>  Thanks for your answers, I realize this is not Gtk stuff,
>  but certainly affects every GTK app involving decimal numbers...
>
>  After setting in my .bashrc, for example (the same with portuguese,
>  russian, etc.):
>
>  LC_ALL=french; export LC_ALL
>
>  Everything automatically works in my GTK app, with commas instead of
>  dots, including exporting and importing files (involving for example the
>  Expat XML library).
>
>  However, a problem remains: my app is distributed with several hundreds
>  of example data files, ready to be imported. If these files are
>  dot-based, comma people cannot import them. If these files are
>  comma-based, dot people cannot import them... Unless I have two versions
>  for each file (which seems odd), or I supply a script to automatically
>  convert dot- to comma-based files...
>
>  If I use gtk_disable_setlocale, then dots are always used, but that does
>  not seem quite right... basically I am ignoring user's preference for
>  commas...
>
>  Is there a good solution for this? am I missing something?
>  What is the standard procedure in Gnome to handle this problem?

Please, consider some rewirtting of your application to do not write
locale-dependent values (floating point numbers, month abbrevs,
day-of-week abbrevs, and so on...) in the data files, or your files
will become unreadable after changing of locale (and, if I understand
correctly, you already hit this problem).  Use some locale-independent
variant instead.

For case of the floating point values it could be dot-based variant as
in the "C" locale.

See g_ascii_dtostr() and/or g_ascii_formatd()  for
formatting/serialization of double to string, and g_ascii_strtod()
and/or g_strtod() converting back from string to double.

-- 
Andrew W. Nosenko <andrew w nosenko gmail com>