Strings and Message Catalogs

Strings and Message Catalogs

Message catalogs are compiled databases of strings. While a major role of message catalogs is to provide communications text in locale-specific natural language, the strings can be used for any purpose. The idea is that an application uses only strings from a catalog, thus allowing localizers to supply catalogs suitable for a given locale.

Two different and incompatible interfaces to message catalogs exist in IRIX: MNLS and XPG/4. Developers working on SVR4 or other AT&T code, or related base-system utilities, probably use MNLS. Developers working on independent projects probably use XPG/4. Neither is a solid standard, but XPG/4 is closer to being a standard than MNLS. Thus applications developers who have to choose between the two interfaces are encouraged to use XPG/4 to maximize their portability. XPG/4 seems to be popular in Europe.

This section covers the following topics:

XPG/4 Message Catalogs
SVR4 MNLS Message Catalogs
Variably Ordered Referencing of printf() Arguments