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Appendix B - International Resources

Long-Date-Format Resource (Type 'itl1')

The long-date-format resource (resource type 'itl1') contains the long date format for a particular region, including the names of days and months, the exact order of presentation of the elements, and the specification of whether or not to suppress any element. (For example, in U.S. format, the long date for 12/3/46 without the name of the day suppressed is Tuesday, December 3, 1946.) The long-date-format resource also has an optional extension for additional month and day names as well as abbreviated month and day names and separators. The extension also specifies the calendar code (for example, Arabic lunar) to use for long dates.

Each enabled script system has one or more long-date-format resources. The resource ID for each one is within the range of resource ID numbers for that script system. The default long-date-format resource for a script system is specified in the itlbDate field of the script's international bundle ('itlb') resource.

The Text Utilities routines DateString, LongDateString, and StringToDate use information in the long-date-format resource to create date strings and to convert date strings to internal numeric representations. See the chapter "Text Utilities" in this book.

The basic (unextended) long-date-format resource specifies

• The long date format. Month and day names, order of elements, and which elements to suppress.
• Separator strings. What characters (commonly punctuation) appear between elements of the date.
• Region code. The number that identifies the regional version of the script system that this long-date-format resource applies to.

IMPORTANT

When it specifies the order of elements, the long-date-format resource describes them in terms of storage order, not display order. Using the information in a long-date-format resource frees you from assuming a particular memory order for the components of long dates. However, the resource does not necessarily specify the left-to-right order for displaying the components.

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Subtopics

The Intl1Rec Data Type

The Itl1ExtRec Data Type