Thanks for the reply,

Well, in answer to the question what data would I like to query from a
Locale, first of all I would like to query for the date, time formats to
get the list of available formats for a locale (and possibly even append
custom formats to this list). I don't see how to get *all* the formats
available for a Locale. Maybe that's just a lack of familiarity with
the ICU classes.

Additionally, when I look at the i18n comparison charts I see that the
major locales, for such languages as English, French and Spanish have
localized names for countries and currencies and time zone names (all of
them) that presumably are keyed to the ISO abbreviations for the same.
It would be useful to be able to access those "tables", as it were, to
display locale information in the appropriate language depending on
client settings.

I can see how you can get the currency symbol for a locale by using a
NumberFormat object instantiated with locale X, but I don't see how you
get the localized name for the currency or country or time zone for a
given locale. (Say the display locale is Japanese and you need to
display all locale country names, currency names and time zones in
Japanese.) So how can you do that?

Unless I misunderstood the ICU design, it looks like only the formatting
classes can be controlled by a Locale object, and that leaves a gaping
hole for getting the kind of cross reference data I'm talking about (as
above, or such as using Chilean Locale data, but with the Japanese
language locale identifiers. Say I'm Japanese and I want to see all the
locale options in Japanese when I make my settings, and then I select
the Chilean locale to format something so the results end up correctly
formatted for a Chilean).

I hope that was clear. And so, how can one do that?

Thanks for any help here,

Elisha Berns


>
> I guess I'll try to answer this question. Other people on the list
can
> correct me if I am wrong.
>
> It seems that you're really asking if you can get query all of the
locale
> data. You can pretty much already do that through various public
APIs. I
> don't recommend opening up a locale resource bundle directly because
the
> data structure may change between versions of ICU. The other public
APIs
> should allow you to access the same information, and those APIs are
much
> more stable. For example you can already get the currency, date,
number
> patterns from ICU along with collation, decimal format symbols,
localized
> format symbols and many other things.
>
> ICU won't be changing much as far as APIs are concerned. The only
> interesting change might be for explicit script support in the locale
> names (probably similar to ISO-3066). For example, you could use
> something like sr-LATN-SP or sr-CYRL-SP depending on whether you
wanted
> Cyrillic or Latin Serbian. We are hoping to get the ISO-3066 script
> support changes into ICU 2.8. Due to some unexpected demands on our
time
> and resources this may slip to 3.0.
>
> ICU is coordinating with other groups with regards to the locale data
> itself, and that is where we are spending a lot of effort right now.
>
> If you were envisioning something else, we welcome your feedback.
>
> George Rhoten
> IBM Globalization Center of Competency/ICU San José, CA, USA
>
>
>
>
> "Elisha Berns"
> Sent by: icu4c-support-admin@oss.software.ibm.com
> 08/28/2003 10:33 AM
> Please respond to e.berns
>
> To:
> cc:
> Subject: Support for Openi18n Question
>
>
> Hi,
>
> Can somebody comment about what support ICU will have for the new
> Openi18n standard and data? I know the ICU team is working on it at
> least as a standard, so I assume that it will also go into an ICU
> release. But what kind of library support do you envision for it in
> terms of classes and APIs?
>
> I ask because it would be great to be able to query a locale object
(or
> something else of course) for the i18n data, but currently I don't see
> any way of doing that.
>
> Does anybody know the general time frame when this type of
functionality
> will be introduced (presuming it will be)?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Elisha Berns
> e.berns@computer.org
> tel. (310) 556 - 8332
> fax (310) 556 - 2839
>
>
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