On Sat, Oct 14, 2023 at 01:24:38PM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote: > > > There seems to be variants of strcoll and of strxfrm, strcoll_l and > > strxfrm_l that allow to specify a locale, but it is not very well > > documented (these functions seem to be in the glibc, but are not > > documented, strcoll and strxfrm are), there are no gnulib modules, and I > > am not sure whether with "C" locale these functions really use the > > specified locale. > > I don't think we want to depend on the locale in Texinfo. The problem > is how to find or write an implementation that on the one side doesn't > use the locale-dependent collation rules, and OTOH ignores punctuation > and other "unimportant" characters.
Exactly. For most needs (column width, classification of characters, ...) there is libunistring that does exactly that. But there are still some problematic cases in C without obvious solution: * sorting of indices * translation of strings (if locale is "C", I could not find a way to have gettext switch the locale based on document locale) A last issue is transliteration. There seems to be //TRANSLIT in iconv but I fear again some issues with portability. In the perl implementation those issues are solved, for gettext with some workarounds, but in C it seems to me to be more challenging. -- Pat
