Fun with Time#to_s and locale

Hi all,

I was futzing around with Time objects and locale. Searching the
archives I didn’t really see anything that let me get Time objects back
in the locale string that I want.

Did I reinvent the wheel?

require ‘Win32API’

class Time
GetDateFormat = Win32API.new(‘kernel32’, ‘GetDateFormat’, ‘LLPPPL’,
‘I’)

def to_s(lang=0)
buffer = 0.chr * 100
systime = [year, mon, wday, day, hour, min, sec].pack(‘S*’)
picture = ‘dddd MMM dd yyyy’ # Or change ‘dddd’ to ‘ddd’

  if GetDateFormat.call(lang, 0, systime, picture, buffer,

buffer.size) == 0
raise get_last_error
end

  buffer = buffer[ /^[^\0]*/ ]

  # Splice the hours, minutes and seconds in
  buffer.split.insert(2, "#{hour}:#{min}:#{sec} #{zone}").join(' ')

end
end

if $0 == FILE
LANG_FRENCH = 0x0c
LANG_GERMAN = 0x07
LANG_SPANISH = 0x0a

p Time.now.to_s # “Tuesday May 11:48:51 MDT 23 2006”
p Time.now.to_s(LANG_GERMAN) # “Dienstag Mai 11:48:51 MDT 23 2006”
p Time.now.to_s(LANG_SPANISH) # “martes may 11:48:51 MDT 23 2006”
p Time.now.to_s(LANG_FRENCH) # “mardi mai 11:48:51 MDT 23 2006”
end

I’ve no idea how to do this on non-Windows systems. Is there an easier
way?

Regards,

Dan

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