Previous: Formatting Numbers, Up: Locales

7.8 Yes-or-No Questions

Some non GUI programs ask a yes-or-no question. If the messages (especially the questions) are translated into foreign languages, be sure that you localize the answers too. It would be very bad habit to ask a question in one language and request the answer in another, often English.

The GNU C library contains rpmatch to give applications easy access to the corresponding locale definitions.

— Function: int rpmatch (const char *response)

The function rpmatch checks the string in response whether or not it is a correct yes-or-no answer and if yes, which one. The check uses the YESEXPR and NOEXPR data in the LC_MESSAGES category of the currently selected locale. The return value is as follows:

1
The user entered an affirmative answer.
0
The user entered a negative answer.
-1
The answer matched neither the YESEXPR nor the NOEXPR regular expression.

This function is not standardized but available beside in GNU libc at least also in the IBM AIX library.

This function would normally be used like this: 

       ...
       /* Use a safe default.  */
       _Bool doit = false;
     
       fputs (gettext ("Do you really want to do this? "), stdout);
       fflush (stdout);
       /* Prepare the getline call.  */
       line = NULL;
       len = 0;
       while (getline (&line, &len, stdout) >= 0)
         {
           /* Check the response.  */
           int res = rpmatch (line);
           if (res >= 0)
             {
               /* We got a definitive answer.  */
               if (res > 0)
                 doit = true;
               break;
             }
         }
       /* Free what getline allocated.  */
       free (line);

Note that the loop continues until an read error is detected or until a definitive (positive or negative) answer is read.