Tribblix: manual page: gettxt.3c

GETTXT(3C) Standard C Library Functions GETTXT(3C)

NAME

gettxt - retrieve a text string

SYNOPSIS

#include <nl_types.h>

char *gettxt(const char *msgid, const char *dflt_str);

DESCRIPTION

The gettxt() function retrieves a text string from a message file.
The arguments to the function are a message identification msgid and
a default string dflt_str to be used if the retrieval fails.

The text strings are in files created by the mkmsgs utility (see
mkmsgs(1)) and installed in directories in
/usr/lib/locale/locale/LC_MESSAGES.

The directory locale can be viewed as the language in which the text
strings are written. The user can request that messages be displayed
in a specific language by setting the environment variable
LC_MESSAGES. If LC_MESSAGES is not set, the environment variable LANG
will be used. If LANG is not set, the files containing the strings
are in /usr/lib/locale/C/LC_MESSAGES/*.

The user can also change the language in which the messages are
displayed by invoking the setlocale(3C) function with the appropriate
arguments.

If gettxt() fails to retrieve a message in a specific language it
will try to retrieve the same message in U.S. English. On failure,
the processing depends on what the second argument dflt_str points
to. A pointer to the second argument is returned if the second
argument is not the null string. If dflt_str points to the null
string, a pointer to the U.S. English text string "Message not
found!!\n" is returned.

The following depicts the acceptable syntax of msgid for a call to
gettxt().

<msgid> = <msgfilename>:<msgnumber>

The first field is used to indicate the file that contains the text
strings and must be limited to 14 characters. These characters must
be selected from the set of all character values excluding \0 (null)
and the ASCII code for / (slash) and : (colon). The names of message
files must be the same as the names of files created by mkmsgs and
installed in /usr/lib/locale/locale/LC_MESSAGES/*. The numeric field
indicates the sequence number of the string in the file. The strings
are numbered from 1 to n where n is the number of strings in the
file.

RETURN VALUES

Upon failure to pass either the correct msgid or a valid message
number to gettxt(), a pointer to the text string "Message not
found!!\n" is returned.

USAGE

It is recommended that gettext(3C) be used in place of this function.

EXAMPLES

Example 1: Example of gettxt() function.

In the following example,

gettxt("UX:10", "hello world\n")
gettxt("UX:10", "")

UX is the name of the file that contains the messages and 10 is the
message number.

FILES

/usr/lib/locale/C/LC_MESSAGES/*

contains default message files created by mkmsgs

/usr/lib/locale/locale/LC_MESSAGES/*

contains message files for different languages created by mkmsgs

ATTRIBUTES