From: Muhammad Asif (mdasif@wol.net.pk)
Date: Tue Mar 25 2003 - 23:46:58 EST
My initial plan for finding out about the current locale is that the
program will, at start up, look at the LC_CTYPE environment variable. If
that variable is defined and contains the substring "UTF-8" or regex-able
variants thereof (like "utf8" on Linux), then everything is fine. If not
present, the program prints a warning message to the user suggesting they
set the locale to a UTF-8 locale and provides an example of how to do
that. If the locale is not set properly, the program still functions, but
of course any UTF-8 encoded data will not be displayed properly on the
terminal.
(Of course, even if a locale *is* set to a UTF-8 locale, it doesn't
guarantee that UTF-8 data will be displayed properly because (1) glyphs
still may not be available in the fonts on the system (2) the terminal may
not handle the script properly (i.e., when I last checked, xterm didn't
handle Indic or RTL scripts)).
I haven't much exp. with UNIX but for Multilingual apps this approach will
be work without any problem. Fortunately in web env. (where most of time i
worked) browser support UTF-8 all we need to do is to detect user lang.
pref and render data in utf-8. But i believe above approach will work fine
except limits you mentioned already about fonts and capabilities of user
client (xterminals).
Asif
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