Hi,

Reading the documentation about DateToStr() and DateTimeToStr(), it mentions that it takes the locale and regional settings in consideration when formatting the date and time. I have a Linux PC that used the USA Linux PC that has South Africa
as location (also specified in the installation setup). I also asked a fellow Russian developer to test on his PC.

We used the following line as mentioned in the docs.

  Writeln(Format ('Today is: %s',[DateToStr(Date)]));

Output under Windows (russian):
Today is: 10.03.2008

Under Windows the formatting seems to work fine under all three PC's tested. Date formats changed accordingly.

Output under Linux:
Today is: 10-3-08

We got the exact same output on all three PC's tested. So basically the locale/region information is totally ignored! Is the date format hard-coded under Linux or is there something vital that we are missing under Linux?

Formats as far as I know should have been:
Russia: dd.mm.yyyy
USA: mm-dd-yyyy (I think)
RSA: dd/mm/yyyy or yyyy/mm/dd (dependent on the OS used)

Regards,
- Graeme -

_______________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit
http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/

The locale/region information is ignored by default. I have a unit that loads this information using Libc or the KDE settings, but it is not an option to have this in sysutils by default, since it introduces a dependency on Libc.

The section on 'Localization support' in the sysutils documentation mentions that:

Localization support depends on various constants and structures being initialized correctly. On Windows and OS/2 this is done automatically: a widestring manager is installed by default which helps taking care of the current locale when performing various operations on strings. The various internationalization settings (date/time format, currency, language etc) are also initialized correctly on these platforms.

Michael.

Thanks Michael. We had an alternative in case FPC hard-coded it. :-) We will use the language translation files to set default (preferred) date/time formats. All other languages will default to the ISO 8601 format.

Summary of ISO 8601 http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html

Constant definitions would look like the following:
  'yyyymmdd"T"hhmmss';    // for storage
  'yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss';  // for display

Regards,
- Graeme -

_______________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit
http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/

Michael Van Canneyt wrote

On Mon, 10 Mar 2008, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:

.
.

Actually, I believe the widestring manager routines are still dummy for OS/2, i.e. not implemented yet. I don't remember about the other internationalization stuff right now from the top of my head.

Tomas