Applying Internationalization

To successfully localize your apps and services, you need to internationalize them first.

Internationalization mainly carries out the following two tasks: marking text strings for translation and formatting locale-sensitive data. Text strings of your apps and services need to be marked for translation. Formatting locale-sensitive data, such as dates, times, numbers, or currency, for different locales and cultural conventions is also required. These are done by using an external internationalization library for each supported programming language.

Internationalization in webOS OSE is available for different programming languages. See Overview for the list of supported programming languages.

JavaScript

For web apps developed in JavaScript, use iLib to internationalize your code.

Enact Apps

Enact framework offers the $L component as part of its i18n library, which provides functions to map to translated strings.

import $L, {toIString} from '@enact/i18n/$L';

$L('Close'); // => "Close" in the current locale
toIString('Close'); // => an ilib IString representing "Close" in the current locale

Node.js

For the Node.js service, use the getString() API of ResBundle feature in iLib. In webOS, iLib is installed in /usr/share/javascript/ilib.

After making and importing iLib, use the ResBundle.getString() method of iLib as follows:

var ResBundle = require('/usr/share/javascript/ilib/lib/ResBundle');

var rb = new ResBundle({locale: "en-US"});
var str = rb.getString("String 1"); // str is iLib string object
var jsStr = str.toString(); // jsStr is js string object

C++/C

If you are developing apps or services in C++/C, use libwebosi18n to internationalize your code.

The following shows an example that uses the getLocString() API of libwebosi18n in C++ and C:

#include <webosi18n.h>

std::string locale = "en-US";
const std::string file = "cppstrings.json";
const std::string resources_path = "/usr/share/localization/samplecpp";
ResBundle* resBundle = new ResBundle(locale, file, resources_path);

resBundle->getLocString("String 1");

#include <webosi18n_C.h>

const char* locale = "en-US";
const char* file = "cstrings.json";
const char* resources_path = "/usr/share/localization/sample_c";
ResBundleC* resBundle = resBundle_createWithRootPath(locale, file, resources_path);

resBundle_getLocString(resBundle, "String 1");

Qt/QML

For Qt/QML apps, follow Qt’s internationalization guidelines. For details, refer to the Qt documentation.