Gettext without process locale

Question

I want to use gettext for i18n. But I need to translate messeges to a different languages. Is it possible to specify a locale for a one gettext call?

Answer 1

If you use multiple threads then you can use gettext if you use the locale-related facilities specified in POSIX.1-2008 (and implemented in GLIBC 2.3). The key function you would use is uselocale, which is a bit like setlocale but for the current thread only.

If you are using Windows then you are out of luck--MSVCRT does not provide an equivalent to uselocale, and I believe on that platform libintl emulates setlocale itself, in a non-thread-safe way IIRC.

Answer 2

As you can see from Replacements for gettext I had similar problems, only it gets worse if you have to support more platforms.

Basically gettext is only really suitable for single-threaded interactive programs.

If you have the chance then a different translation system (ICU looks quite nice).

Otherwise there are a few libraries that read .mo files directly, and can provide the translation as you want:

http://art-blog.no-ip.info/cppcms/blog/post/16

Answer 3

I want to use gettext for i18n. But I need to translate messeges to a different languages.

If your application is single threaded you may switch locale, otherwise you can't use gettext library for this purpose.

Is it possible to specify a locale for a one gettext call?

You may use Unofficial Boost library Boost.Locale that supports gettext message catalogs. But it is C++ only.