textdomain (3)

Leading comments

Copyright (c) Bruno Haible <haible@clisp.cons.org>

This is free documentation; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as
published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of
the License, or (at your option) any later version.

References consulted:
  GNU glibc-2 source code and manual
  GNU gettext source code and manual
  LI18NUX 2000 Globalization Specification

(The comments found at the beginning of the groff file "man3/textdomain.3".)

NAME

textdomain - set domain for future gettext() calls

SYNOPSIS

#include <libintl.h>

char * textdomain (const char * domainname);

DESCRIPTION

The textdomain function sets or retrieves the current message domain.

A message domain is a set of translatable msgid messages. Usually, every software package has its own message domain. The domain name is used to determine the message catalog where a translation is looked up; it must be a non-empty string.

The current message domain is used by the gettext, ngettext functions, and by the dgettext, dcgettext, dngettext and dcngettext functions when called with a NULL domainname argument.

If domainname is not NULL, the current message domain is set to domainname. The string the function stores internally is a copy of the domainname argument.

If domainname is NULL, the function returns the current message domain.

RETURN VALUE

If successful, the textdomain function returns the current message domain, after possibly changing it. The resulting string is valid until the next textdomain call and must not be modified or freed. If a memory allocation failure occurs, it sets errno to ENOMEM and returns NULL.

ERRORS

The following error can occur, among others:

ENOMEM

Not enough memory available.

BUGS

The return type ought to be const char *, but is char * to avoid warnings in C code predating ANSI C.

SEE ALSO

gettext(3), ngettext(3), bindtextdomain(3), bind_textdomain_codeset(3)