Re: get list of available locales

[Allin Cottrell <cottrell wfu edu>]

On Mon, 14 Sep 2009, Matthew Talbert wrote:

> In our GTK/GNOME application, our users would like the ability to use
> the program in a locale of their choice (out of the ~10 translations
> we have available) rather than detecting automatically which to use.
> (well, most users will be fine with automatic, but we have some
> exceptions). So we've implemented this by setting LC_ALL before we
> initialize GTK/GNOME. The unfortunate part of this is that there seems
> to be a lot of variations in how this variable actually works on
> different distros. For example, "fr_FR" is fine for Fedora, but Ubuntu
> requires it to be fr_FR.UTF-8. This is true for most locales, but
> there are some on Ubuntu that do not have the ending UTF-8 as well.
>
> My question is whether there is a way, either in the gtk stack or
> elsewhere, to get a list of available locales at runtime so that we
> can match this up as best as possible.

We've implemented this sort of thing -- a language selector that
lets you choose between 13 supported languages -- in gretl,
another GTK app.  I'm not sure we're doing it in the best way, but
it seems to work OK.  It's definitely fiddly work. To see what we
did, look at gretl_intl.c, lines 398 to 680.

http://gretl.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/gretl/gretl/lib/src/gretl_intl.c?revision=1.61&view=markup

Allin Cottrell