Language

class Language(*args, **kwargs)

The PangoLanguage structure is used to represent a language.

PangoLanguage pointers can be efficiently copied and compared with each other.

Methods

class Language

from_string(language: str | None = None) → Language | None

Convert a language tag to a PangoLanguage.

The language tag must be in a RFC-3066 format. PangoLanguage pointers can be efficiently copied (copy the pointer) and compared with other language tags (compare the pointer.)

This function first canonicalizes the string by converting it to lowercase, mapping ‘_’ to ‘-’, and stripping all characters other than letters and ‘-‘.

Use get_default if you want to get the PangoLanguage for the current locale of the process.

Parameters:: language – a string representing a language tag

get_default() → Language

Returns the PangoLanguage for the current locale of the process.

On Unix systems, this is the return value is derived from setlocale (LC_CTYPE, NULL), and the user can affect this through the environment variables LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE or LANG (checked in that order). The locale string typically is in the form lang_COUNTRY, where lang is an ISO-639 language code, and COUNTRY is an ISO-3166 country code. For instance, sv_FI for Swedish as written in Finland or pt_BR for Portuguese as written in Brazil.

On Windows, the C library does not use any such environment variables, and setting them won’t affect the behavior of functions like ctime(). The user sets the locale through the Regional Options in the Control Panel. The C library (in the setlocale() function) does not use country and language codes, but country and language names spelled out in English. However, this function does check the above environment variables, and does return a Unix-style locale string based on either said environment variables or the thread’s current locale.

Your application should call setlocale(LC_ALL, "") for the user settings to take effect. GTK does this in its initialization functions automatically (by calling gtk_set_locale()). See the setlocale() manpage for more details.

Note that the default language can change over the life of an application.

Also note that this function will not do the right thing if you use per-thread locales with uselocale(). In that case, you should just call from_string() yourself.

Added in version 1.16.

get_preferred() → list[Language] | None

Returns the list of languages that the user prefers.

The list is specified by the PANGO_LANGUAGE or LANGUAGE environment variables, in order of preference. Note that this list does not necessarily include the language returned by get_default.

When choosing language-specific resources, such as the sample text returned by get_sample_string, you should first try the default language, followed by the languages returned by this function.

Added in version 1.48.

get_sample_string() → str

Get a string that is representative of the characters needed to render a particular language.

The sample text may be a pangram, but is not necessarily. It is chosen to be demonstrative of normal text in the language, as well as exposing font feature requirements unique to the language. It is suitable for use as sample text in a font selection dialog.

If language is None, the default language as found by get_default is used.

If Pango does not have a sample string for language, the classic “The quick brown fox…” is returned. This can be detected by comparing the returned pointer value to that returned for (non-existent) language code “xx”. That is, compare to:

pango_language_get_sample_string (pango_language_from_string ("xx"))

get_scripts() → list[Script] | None

Determines the scripts used to to write language.

If nothing is known about the language tag language, or if language is None, then None is returned. The list of scripts returned starts with the script that the language uses most and continues to the one it uses least.

The value num_script points at will be set to the number of scripts in the returned array (or zero if None is returned).

Most languages use only one script for writing, but there are some that use two (Latin and Cyrillic for example), and a few use three (Japanese for example). Applications should not make any assumptions on the maximum number of scripts returned though, except that it is positive if the return value is not None, and it is a small number.

The includes_script function uses this function internally.

Note: while the return value is declared as PangoScript, the returned values are from the GUnicodeScript enumeration, which may have more values. Callers need to handle unknown values.

Added in version 1.22.

includes_script(script: Script) → bool

Determines if script is one of the scripts used to write language.

The returned value is conservative; if nothing is known about the language tag language, True will be returned, since, as far as Pango knows, script might be used to write language.

This routine is used in Pango’s itemization process when determining if a supplied language tag is relevant to a particular section of text. It probably is not useful for applications in most circumstances.

This function uses get_scripts internally.

Added in version 1.4.

Parameters:: script – a PangoScript

matches(range_list: str) → bool

Checks if a language tag matches one of the elements in a list of language ranges.

A language tag is considered to match a range in the list if the range is ‘*’, the range is exactly the tag, or the range is a prefix of the tag, and the character after it in the tag is ‘-‘.

Parameters:: range_list – a list of language ranges, separated by ‘;’, ‘:’, ‘,’, or space characters. Each element must either be ‘*’, or a RFC 3066 language range canonicalized as by from_string

to_string() → str

Gets the RFC-3066 format string representing the given language tag.

Returns (transfer none): a string representing the language tag