Using GNU gettext on Win32

Question

I'm writing a game that is mainly geared for GNU/Linux and Mac OS X systems, but I've been keeping things fairly portable in most of my code.

I've ported nearly all of the OS-specific stuff to Windows; the only thing remaining is i18n.

My question is this

How am I supposed to use Win32's setlocale() function along with gettext?

Until now, I've been using ISO 638/ISO 3166 codes (ex. de_DE.utf8), but these don't seem to work on Windows.

I've tried setlocale(LC_ALL, "German"), which succeeds, but gettext can't find the translated strings correctly, even after using bindtextdomain.

Any hints? I'd like to stick with GNU gettext to avoid rewriting heaps of code.

Answer 1

Well, after some digging, I found the answer: setlocale() on Windows does nothing for gettext. gettext uses the user's environment and the thread's locale (see GetThreadLocale, SetThreadLocale). If the thread's locale is used, the returned LCID is transformed into a language string with ISO 639 and 3166 (ex. en_US) and the lookup proceeds as on *nix.

Answer 2

If you can read Python example there is my tiny project which helps to convert windows locale ids to gettext language codes like de_DE: https://launchpad.net/gettext-py-windows

In short you need to obtain LCID with function GetUserDefaultLCID() which returns you an integer id. Then you need to map this value to string code. In Python there is map in the standard module locale.py: see windows_locale dictionary near the bottom of the file http://svn.python.org/view/python/trunk/Lib/locale.py?view=markup

The list of Windows locale ids you can find here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd318693%28VS.85%29.aspx

Once you will have language code (de_DE) you need to pass it either directly to gettext library or indirectly using environment variable LANGUAGE.