IDLffLangCat

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The IDLffLangCat class is used to find and load an XML language catalog. A language catalog is composed of key names and key values. The key value of the specified key name can be retrieved to support internationalization. For example:

<KEY NAME='Menu:File:Open'>Open...</KEY>

in an English language catalog would appear as the following in a French language catalog:

<KEY NAME='Menu:File:Open'>Ouvrir...</KEY>

By handling files that contain keys and values like these, the IDLffLangCat class supports internationalization of user interfaces and other applications that need to display the same strings in more than one language.

The language catalogs included with IDL are in the <IDL_DIR>/resource/langcat directory and end in a .cat extension. You can use other catalogs, but all catalogs must end with the .cat extension.

Note
The IDLffLangCat class supports catalog files written in 8-bit strings (which can be encoded for languages using special marks; see below). Also, you must have the corresponding fonts installed on your machine before you can use a particular language.

A language-catalog file can support accent marks such as those in French (which stray from the first 128 character codes defined by ASCII into the ISO-8859 encodings) if you do one of the following actions:

Add encoding='ISO8859-1' to the XML tag element at the beginning of the file (e.g., <xml version='1.0' encoding='ISO8859-1'?>)

Save the XML file as Unicode

In general, you should use the encoding appropriate for your catalog's language. For the list of supported encodings and for more general information about XML, see About XML (Application Programming).

Note
For more information on this class, including examples of how to use it, see Using Language Catalogs in the Building IDL Applications manual.