I am creating an OpenGL game and I would like to make it open to more languages than just English for obvious reasons. From looking around and fiddling around with the games installed on my computer I can see that locales play a big part in this and that .lang files, such as en-US.lang that is shipped with minecraft, are basically text documents with a language code, "item.iron.ingot" for example, an equal sign, and then what it means for that given language, English as per en-US, so in this case would be, "Iron Ingot". Well I created a file that I named en-US.lang and this is its contents:
item.iron.ingot=Iron Ingot
In my C++ main method I put:
setlocale(LC_ALL, "en-US");
After including the locale header file. So I suppose the part that I am confused by is how to use the locales to read from the .lang file? Please help SO and some example code would be appreciated.
C++ Does not come with a built-in support for resource files / internationalization. However there is a huge variety of solutions.
To support multi-language messages, you should have some basic understanding of how such strings are encoded in files and read to memory. Here is a basic introduction if you are not familiar:
"http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html"
To keep and load the correct text at runtime you need to use a third party library: GNU gettext http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/ is one such example. However there are other solutions out there.
Related
i'm new to c++ and need a way for detecting the language of the text.
i searched for any plugin to do that and only found the chromum open source code.
https://code.google.com/p/cld2/
there is many pages talking about using it at python, java or stand alone but i cant find any tutorial about using it in a c++ code.
so i need a declaration for how to use it or any other good library for detecting the text language using c++.
the language text will be added by user and i want to detect if it is English , French or Arabic .. etc to apply nlp according to that.
Thanks,
Although its not a library, one option you have is to simply use Google translates API to detect the language. This is done using REST. The obvious downside is that you need to be connected to the internet to make the call. The docs explain how you can do this here
I m writing a c++ program using files and i need to take the input from existing files such as doc files and pdf files. how to program it in c++? And after getting the inputs, how can i write those details into a new doc or pdf files? Can anyone explain me with an example?
C++ as a language doesn't equip you with such features as "write to DOC file" or "read from PDF file". The only staff available to you a a programmer is raw byte-by-byte reading or writing. To make your new brand file as PDF/DOC/etc compatible you have to conform the chosen file format. The same about reading - you should understand which portions of raw byte array are responsible for what.
In common, this task named as "parsing" or "serialization". And it's a good idea to use one of existing parsers for particular file format instead of reinventing the wheel. Moreover, some file formats can be patent-pending so you may be not allowed to deal with it without license purchase.
Some clues so far:
PDF parsing in C++ (PoDoFo)
Microsoft word Text Parser in "C"
There are some libraries available on the web now(the question is from 2013, maybe that time there weren't many).
Apart from the links in selected answer, you can try PDFTron. It also supports new features, eg. Linearization.
Here is one of their samples is ->
https://www.pdftron.com/documentation/samples/cpp/TextExtractTest
(That program itself contains 4 if blocks, with slightly different features of the library/SDK, to try)
There should be more, search on the web for PDF parsing libraries.
I am writing a program that produces a formatted file for the user, but it's not only producing the formatted file, it does more.
I want to distribute a single binary to the end user and when the user runs the program, it will generate the xml file for the user with appropriate data.
In order to achieve this, I want to give the file contents to a char array variable that is compiled in code. When the user runs the program, I will write out the char file to generate an xml file for the user.
char* buffers = "a xml format file contents, \
this represent many block text \
from a file,...";
I have two questions.
Q1. Do you have any other ideas for how to compile my file contents into binary, i.e, distribute as one binary file.
Q2. Is this even a good idea as I described above?
What you describe is by far the norm for C/C++. For large amounts of text data, or for arbitrary binary data (or indeed any data you can store in a file - e.g. zip file) you can write the data to a file, link it into your program directly.
An example may be found on sites like this one
I'll recommend using another file to contain data other than putting data into the binary, unless you have your own reasons. I don't know other portable ways to put strings into binary file, but your solution seems OK.
However, note that using \ at the end of line to form strings of multiple lines, the indentation should be taken care of, because they are concatenated from the begging of the next lineļ¼
char* buffers = "a xml format file contents, \
this represent many block text \
from a file,...";
Or you can use another form:
char *buffers =
"a xml format file contents,"
"this represent many block text"
"from a file,...";
Probably, my answer provides much redundant information for topic-starter, but here are what I'm aware of:
Embedding in source code: plain C/C++ solution it is a bad idea because each time you will want to change your content, you will need:
recompile
relink
It can be acceptable only your content changes very rarely or never of if build time is not an issue (if you app is small).
Embedding in binary: Few little more flexible solutions of embedding content in executables exists, but none of them cross-platform (you've not stated your target platform):
Windows: resource files. With most IDEs it is very simple
Linux: objcopy.
MacOS: Application Bundles. Even more simple than on Windows.
You will not need recompile C++ file(s), only re-link.
Application virtualization: there are special utilities that wraps all your application resources into single executable, that runs it similar to as on virtual machine.
I'm only aware of such utilities for Windows (ThinApp, BoxedApp), but there are probably such things for other OSes too, or even cross-platform ones.
Consider distributing your application in some form of installer: when starting installer it creates all resources and unpack executable. It is similar to generating whole stuff by main executable. This can be large and complex package or even simple self-extracting archive.
Of course choice, depends on what kind of application you are creating, who are your target auditory, how you will ship package to end-users etc. If it is a game and you targeting children its not the same as Unix console utility for C++ coders =)
It depends. If you are doing some small unix style utility with no perspective on internatialization, then it's probably fine. You don't want to bloat a distributive with a file no one would ever touch anyways.
But in general it is a bad practice, because eventually someone might want to modify this data and he or she would have to rebuild the whole thing just to fix a typo or anything.
The decision is really up to you.
If you just want to keep your distributive in one piece, you might also find this thread interesting: Store data in executable
Why don't you distribute your application with an additional configuration file? e.g. package your application executable and config file together.
If you do want to make it into a single file, try embed your config file into the executable one as resources.
I see it more of an OS than C/C++ issue. You can add the text to the resource part of your binary/program. In Windows programs HTML, graphics and even movie files are often compiled into resources that make part of the final binary.
That is handy for possible future translation into another language, plus you can modify resource part of the binary without recompiling the code.
Is there a library that will allow easier generation of a simple website using C++ code. This 'website' will then be compiled into a CHM help file (which is the final goal here). Ideally, it will allow generation of pages easily and allow links to be generated between pages easily. I can do this all by hand, but that is going be very tedious and error prone.
I know about bigger libraries such as Wt, but am more interested in smaller ones with little or no dependencies and a need for installation.
You can try CTPP template engine. It is written in C++ is small and quite fast.
Do you need this project to be written in c++? Because if you just need to prepare documentation in CHM I would go with Sphinx. Sphinx is a set of tools written in Python that generate manuals in few formats (chm, html, LaTeX, PDF) from text files (formated using reStructuredText markup language). Those text files could be created by hand or using some application and then combined into one manual using Sphinx. In my work right now we are using this solution to write documentation, because it is very easy to maintain text files (merging, tracking changes etc.) than for example html or doc. Sphinx is used to generate Python language documentation (chm), so it is capable to handle really large project.
I've used the FLATE library every day for ten years and it works flawlessly. It's a piece of cake to use; I can't recommend it enough.
It will definitely do the trick, though probably at a much lower level than you have in mind. It is a C-language source library that you can link with a C++ caller. It's also available as a Perl module, but I haven't used that.
FLATE library
Flate is a template library used to deal with html code in CGI applications. The library includes C and Perl support. All html code is put in an external file (the template) and printed using the library functions: variables, zones (parts to be displayed or not) and tables (parts to be displayed 0 to n times). Using this method you don't need to modify/recompile your application when modifying html code, printing order doesn't matter in your CGI code, and your CGI code is much cleaner.
HTH and good luck!
Are this CHM lib and the related links what you're looking for?
I need some methods of storing and getting data from a file (in WIN32 api c++ application, not MFC or .NET)
e.g. saving the x, y, width and height of the window when you close it, and loading the data when you open the window.
I have tried .ini files, with the functions -- WritePrivateProfileString and ReadPrivateProfileString/Int, but on MSDN it says
"This function is provided only for compatibility with 16-bit Windows-based applications. Applications should store initialization information in the registry."
and when i tried on my Windows7 64bit machine to read a ini file, i got blue screen! (in debug mode with visual studio) O.O
I notice that most other application use XML to store data, but I don't have a clue how to read/write xml data in c++, are there any libraries or windows functions which will allow me to use xml data?
Any other suggestions would be good too, thanks.
There is nothing wrong with .ini files, the only problem with them is where to write them. CIniFile from CodeProject is good enough class. Ini file should be placed in %APPDATA%/<Name Of Your Application> (or %LOCALAPPDATA%\<Same Name Here>, as described below).
EDIT: If we are talking about Windows family of operating systems from Windows 2000 onward then function SHGetFolderPath is portable way to retrieve user specific folder where application configuration files should be stored. To store data in romaing folder use CSIDL_APPDATA with SHGetFolderPath. To store data to local folder use CSIDL_LOCAL_APPDATA.
The difference between local and roaming folder is in the nature of the data to be stored. If data is too large or machine specific then store it in local folder. Your data (coordinates and size of the window) are local in nature (on other machine you may have different resolution), so you should actually use CSIDL_LOCAL_APPDATA.
Windows Vista and later have extended function SHGetKnownFolderPath with its own set of constants, but if you seek compatibility stick to the former SHGetFolderPath.
TinyXML is a popular and simple XML parser for C++.
Apart from that, you can really use any format you want to store your settings, though it's considered good practice to keep settings in text format so that they can be hand-edited if necessary.
It's fairly simple to write your own functions for reading/writing a file in INI or similar format. The format is entirely up to you, as long as it's easily comprehensible to humans. Some possibilities are:
; Comment
# Comment
Key = Value (standard INI format)
Key Value
Key: Value
You could use Boost.PropertyTree for this.
Property trees are versatile data
structures, but are particularly
suited for holding configuration data.
The tree provides its own,
tree-specific interface, and each node
is also an STL-compatible Sequence for
its child nodes.
It supports serialization, and so is well-suited to managing and persisting changeable configuration data. There is an example here on how to load and save using the XML data format that this library supports.
The library uses RapidXML internally but hides the parsing and encoding details, which would save you some implementation time (XML libraries all have their idiosyncracies), while still allowing you to use XML as the data representation on disk.
libxml2. I have seen quite a lot places where it is used. Easy to use and loads of examples to get you started and not a vast library as such. And in C, take it wherever you want.
pugixml is another good (and well documented) XML parser library. And If you like portability XML is a better option.
While INI files may not be the best format, I think you can safely ignore the warning MSDN puts on WritePrivateProfileString and ReadPrivateProfileString.
Those two functions are NEVER going away. It would break THOUSANDS of applications.
That warning has been there for years and I suspect was added when the registry was all the rage and someone naively thought it would one day completely replace INI files.
I might be wrong but it would be very unlike Microsoft to break so many existing apps like this for no good reasons. (Not that they do not occasionally break backwards compatibility, but this would cause huge problems for zero benefit.)
Ohhh My GOD? Have you ever thought of stright-forward solution rather then thinking of Super-Duper-all-can-do framework way?
Sorry...
You want to store two numbers between restarts???
Save: Open a file, write these two numbers, close the file:
std::ifstream out(file_name);
out << x << ' ' << y;
out.close();
Load: Open a file, read these two numbers, close the file:
std::ifstream in(file_name);
if(!in) return error...
in >> x >> y;
if(!in) return error...
in.close();
Libconfig is the best solution in C++ as far as I have tried.
Works multi platform with minimum coding.
You must try that!
I like the TinyXML solution suggested.
But for Windows, I like .ini even more.
So I'll suggest the inih library, free and open source on GitHub here. Very simple and easy to use - 1 header file library iirc.