League --- Localization, Internationalization and Globalization

Strings and Cursors

The type Universal_String is declared in the package League.Strings. It represents string of Unicode characters. Two conversion operations To_Universal_String and To_Wide_Wide_String allow conversion between Universal_String and Wide_Wide_String. Set of overloaded concatenation operators --- "&" --- provides concatenation operations between Universal_String, Universal_Character, Wide_Wide_String and Wide_Wide_Character and returns Universal_String. See following example:

with Ada.Wide_Wide_Text_IO; use Ada.Wide_Wide_Text_IO;

with League.Strings;        use League.String;

procedure Example is
   S : Universal_String;

begin
   S := To_Universal_String ("Hello");
   S := S & ',';
   S := S & " world";

   Put_Line (S.To_Wide_Wide_String);
end Example;

Cursors

It is possible to use usual loop for iteration:

procedure Iterator (S : Universal_String) is
   C : Universal_Character;

begin
   for J in 1 .. S.Length loop
      C := S.Element (J);
   end loop;
end Iterator;

Additionally, several kinds of cursors are available:

• Character_Cursor --- iterates over each character in the string;
• Grapheme_Cluster_Cursor --- iterates over grapheme clusters (sequence of character represented as one character for user) in the string.

Iteration loop with cursor:

procedure Iterator (S : Universal_String) is
   C : Universal_String;
   J : Grapheme_Cluster_Cursor := First (S);

begin
   while not J.Has_Element loop
      C := J.Element;
      J.Next;
   end loop;
end Iterator;

Equivalence and compare

There are several kinds of important equivalence for strings. "Default" equivalence and compare are based on binary order of code points.

Collation

Collation is a same thing as comparison, but it result is more user friendly. Collation also can be tailored by the current locale. Comparison using collation is divided into two steps --- construction of sort keys and compare them. Following example show difference between binary comparison and collation:

with Ada.Wide_Wide_Text_IO; use Ada.Wide_Wide_Text_IO;

with League.Strings;        use League.Strings;

procedure Collation is
   S1 : Universal_String := To_Universal_String ("ёж");
   S2 : Universal_String := To_Universal_String ("ель");
   K1 : Sort_Key := S1.Collation;
   K2 : Sort_Key := S2.Collation;

begin
   if S1 < S2 then
      Put_Line ("Binary comparison: less");

   elsif S1 = S2 then
      Put_Line ("Binary comparison: equal");

   else
      Put_Line ("Binary comparison: greater");
   end case;

   if K1 < K2 then
      Put_Line ("Collation: less");

   elsif K1 = K2 then
      Put_Line ("Collation: equal");

   else
      Put_Line ("Collation: greater");
   end if;
end Collation;

Case conversions and case folding

It is possible to convert case of the all characters in the string and do case folding with To_Lowercase, To_Uppercase and To_Casefold functions.