Some of GetGeoInfo is sorta broken

re: Some of GetGeoInfo is sorta broken

Nick Lamb — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 13:39:23 GMT

"a GEOID and LANGID that do not match"

RFC 1766 doesn't have a notion of matching countries and languages. The API here makes sense technically. To make up an RFC 1766 language tag from ISO codes you want a language (e.g. Japanese, "ja") and a country code (e.g. the United Kingdom, "GB"). In Windows programmers may have these opaque numeric IDs for everything - so it makes sense on the surface to map (LANGID, GEOID) -> (RFC 1766)

However, although the API makes sense, it's not clear what possible real world /use/ it is. RFC 1766 can represent a British dialect of Japanese, but it's more likely that Japanese speakers in the UK are using the same language as their counterparts in Japan. The constructor described for Windows language IDs already seems to understand the idea of dialects and other variants, albeit in a rather primitive way. Is there a way to ask directly for the RFC1766 representation of a Windows LANGID?

re: Some of GetGeoInfo is sorta broken

Michael S. Kaplan — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 13:43:10 GMT

Hi Nick --

You can ask for the various ISO names (639 and 3166) which together make a nice first cut at an RFC1766 or even RFC3066 name, but toget them toether you have to look to Vista....

Location in the Regional and Languages options control panel

Sriram Krishnan — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 23:21:32 GMT

One of the free perks of working for Microsoft - when you want to know why a feature in a Microsoft product...

GetGeoInfo is a mostly useless bloody waste of a function that only a "B" Ark Golgafrincham could love

Sorting it all Out — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 18:27:08 GMT

Content of Michael Kaplan's personal blog not approved by Microsoft (see disclaimer )! I always want