gettxt(3C)            (C Program Language Utilities)             gettxt(3C)


   NAME
         gettxt - retrieve a text string

   SYNOPSIS
         #include <nltypes.h>

         char *gettxt (const char *msgid, const char *dfltstr);

   DESCRIPTION
         gettxt retrieves a text string from a message file. The arguments to
         the function are a message identification msgid and a default string
         dflt_str to be used if the retrieval fails.

         The text strings are in files created by the mkmsgs utility [see
         mkmsgs(1)] and installed in directories in
         /usr/lib/locale/<locale>/LCMESSAGES.

         The directory <locale> can be viewed as the language in which the
         text strings are written.  The user can request that messages be
         displayed in a specific language by setting the environment variable
         LCMESSAGES.  If LCMESSAGES is not set, the environment variable
         LANG will be used.  If LANG is not set, the files containing the
         strings are in /usr/lib/locale/C/LCMESSAGES/*.

         The user can also change the language in which the messages are
         displayed by invoking the setlocale function with the appropriate
         arguments.

         If gettxt fails to retrieve a message in a specific language it will
         try to retrieve the same message in U.S. English.  On failure, the
         processing depends on what the second argument dflt_str points to.  A
         pointer to the second argument is returned if the second argument is
         not the null string.  If dflt_str points to the null string, a
         pointer to the U.S. English text string "Message not found!!\n" is
         returned.

         The following depicts the acceptable syntax of msgid for a call to
         gettxt.

               <msgid> = <msgfilename>:<msgnumber>

         The first field is used to indicate the file that contains the text
         strings and must be limited to 14 characters.  These characters must
         be selected from the set of all character values excluding \0 (null)
         and the ASCII code for / (slash) and : (colon).  The names of message
         files must be the same as the names of files created by mkmsgs and
         installed in /usr/lib/locale/<locale>/LCMESSAGES/*.  The numeric
         field indicates the sequence number of the string in the file.  The
         strings are numbered from 1 to n where n is the number of strings in
         the file.



   8/91                                                                 Page 1

   gettxt(3C)            (C Program Language Utilities)             gettxt(3C)


         On failure to pass the correct msgid or a valid message number to
         gettxt a pointer to the text string "Message not found!!\n" is
         returned.

   EXAMPLE
               gettxt("UX:10", "hello world\n")
               gettxt("UX:10", "")

         UX is the name of the file that contains the messages.  10 is the
         message number.

   FILES
         /usr/lib/locale/C/LCMESSAGES/*     contains  default message files created by
                                             mkmsgs

         /usr/lib/locale/locale/LCMESSAGES/*      contains message files for different
                                                   languages created by mkmsgs

   SEE ALSO
         fmtmsg(3C), setlocale(3C), environ(5).
         exstr(1), mkmsgs(1), srchtxt(1) in the User's Reference Manual.
































   Page 2                                                                 8/91