Triggering gettext Operations

The initialization of locale data should be done with more or less the same code in every program, as demonstrated below:

int
main (argc, argv)
     int argc;
     char argv;
{
  ...
  setlocale (LC_ALL, "");
  bindtextdomain (PACKAGE, LOCALEDIR);
  textdomain (PACKAGE);
  ...
}

PACKAGE and LOCALEDIR should be provided either by `config.h' or by the Makefile. For now consult the gettext sources for more information.

The use of LC_ALL might not be appropriate for you. LC_ALL includes all locale categories and especially LC_CTYPE. This later category is responsible for determining character classes with the isalnum etc. functions from `ctype.h' which could especially for programs, which process some kind of input language, be wrong. For example this would mean that a source code using the (cedille character) is runnable in France but not in the U.S.

So it is sometimes necessary to replace the LC_ALL line in the code above by a sequence of setlocale lines

{
  ...
  setlocale (LC_TIME, "");
  setlocale (LC_MESSAGES, "");
  ...
}

or to switch for and back to the character class in question.

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