# Copyright (c) 1995-2024 Sullivan Beck. All rights reserved.
# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
# under the same terms as Perl itself.

=pod

=head1 NAME

Date::Manip::Lang - language support for Date::Manip

=head1 DESCRIPTION

Date::Manip supports a number of different languages when
parsing dates, and more can be added.

=head1 CURRENT LANGUAGES

Currently, the following languages are supported by Date::Manip.
The version of Date::Manip where they were added is included (so
you can see the minimum version of Date::Manip needed to parse
each).

The language can be chosen by setting the Language config
variable to the name of the language or any of the aliases
included in the table.

All names and aliases are case insensitive.

   Language     Version  Aliases

   English      default  en, en_us

   Catalan      5.43     ca
   Danish       5.41     da
   Dutch        5.32     Nederlands, nl
   Finnish      6.31     fi, fi_fi
   French       5.02     fr, fr_fr
   German       5.31     de, de_de
   Italian      5.35     it, it_it
   Norwegian    6.21     nb, nb_no
   Polish       5.32     pl, pl_pl
   Portuguese   5.34     pt, pt_pt
   Romanian     5.35     ro, ro_ro
   Russian      5.41     ru, ru_ru
   Spanish      5.33     es, es_es
   Swedish      5.05     sv
   Turkish      5.41     tr, tr_tr

=head1 ADDING A LANGUAGE

Adding a language is easily done (if you're fluent in both English
and the other language).  If you want to add a new language, do the
following:

=over 4

=item Language name

When you submit the new language, I'll need the name of the
language (of course) and any common locale names that might
be useful for people to select the language.

For example, if you were creating a Spanish translation (which is not
necessary since it already exists), I would need the following list:

   spanish es es_es

=item Copy the english module

Copy the english.pm file (which is in lib/Date/Manip/Lang in the
Date::Manip distribution) to the new language (i.e. spanish.pm in
this example).

=item Set some variables in the new module

The new module (spanish.pm) will need a few simple modifications.
Change the package name from 'english' to 'spanish'.

Fix the C<@Encodings> lines.  Most languages can be written in more
than one encoding.  The first encoding in the list should be utf-8
and the last should be perl.  Include any other encodings that
should be supported as well.

Set the C<$YearAdded> and C<$LangName> appropriately.

=item Translate the language terms

The data section of the module is fairly straightforward to translate.

Every term is defined in the L<Date::Manip::Lang::english> document
(or in any of the other language module documents), so please
refer to it to find out what each element means.  Then replace the
English version with the new translation.

There are some requirements:

1) Every element should be defined (except for the sephm and sepms
elements which are optional).

2) The module must be written using UTF-8 characters if the language
includes any non-ASCII characters.

3) Each element includes a list of values (different variations of the
element).  In most cases, the order of the values for each element is
not important since they are just used to create a regular expression
for parsing dates, but a few of them are also used to determine printable
values using the C<Date::Manip::Date::printf> method (or the C<UnixDate>
function).  These elements are:

   Element       printf directive

   ampm          %p
   day_abb       %a
   day_char      %v
   day_name      %A
   month_abb     %b
   month_name    %B
   nth           %E

For each of these, the value that should be printed out must be the
first value in the list.

4) When possible, if a language includes characters that are
essentially ASCII characters with a punctuation mark, please include a
variation of the value which is just ASCII with the punctuation
removed.  For example, the spanish name for Saturday in ASCII would be
written sabado, but in reality, the first 'a' has an accent over
it. This word should appear twice... first in full UTF-8 encoding, and
second as all ASCII. If the language (Russian for example) has no
ASCII equivalent, just include the UTF-8 representation.

=back

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

=head1 LANGUAGE SPECIFIC RULES

In the language file, there is one special value named _special_rules.
This is a hash of special parsing rules that will be applied for this
language.

Currently the following rules are available:

=over 4

=item remove_trailing_period

If this is set, trailing periods will be removed.

For example, in German, default output of the date command includes a
day of month with a trailing period.  For example:

   Mo 3. Jan 11:00:00 EST 2022

If this rule is set, periods followed by whitespace (or an end of string) are
stripped.

=item remove_parens

This will strip parentheses () from a string.

=item strip_word

This is a list of words that will be stripped from a string.  Each word must be
bracketed by the start/end of the string or whitespace.

=back

=head1 SEE ALSO

L<Date::Manip>        - main module documentation

=head1 LICENSE

This script is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

=head1 AUTHOR

Sullivan Beck (sbeck@cpan.org)

=cut
