illumos: 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