6.9.4 New Functions

Certain locale-dependent capabilities were added as new standard functions. Besides setlocale(), which allows control over the locale itself, the Standard includes the following new functions:

In addition, there are the multibyte functions mblen(), mbtowc(), mbstowcs(), wctomb(), and wcstombs().

The localeconv() function returns a pointer to a structure containing information useful for formatting numeric and monetary information appropriate to the current locale’s LC_NUMERIC and LC_MONETARY categories. This is the only function whose behavior depends on more than one category. For numeric values, the structure describes the decimal-point character, the thousands separator, and where the separator(s) should be located. There are fifteen other structure members that describe how to format a monetary value.

The strcoll() function is analogous to the strcmp() function, except that the two strings are compared according to the LC_COLLATE category of the current locale. The strxfrm() function can also be used to transform a string into another, such that any two such after-translation strings can be passed to strcmp(), and get an ordering analogous to what strcoll() would have returned if passed the two pre-translation strings.

The strftime() function provides formatting similar to that used with sprintf() of the values in a struct tm, along with some date and time representations that depend on the LC_TIME category of the current locale. This function is based on the ascftime() function released as part of UNIX System V Release 3.2.