Windows Language Related Crashes

[LP]

MS, why you did this I have no clue, for NT 7, change it back! please?

What Microsoft had to do with this?

In the beginning of your program, use this: DecimalSeparator:= '.'; // or ","

Also, properly written code shouldn't break because of this, if you use Try...Except statements for StrToFloat; StrToFloatDef will simply return default value if invalid character is found. Never seen access violations happen with these functions.

[WILL]

What on earth is a "Windows Language"? It's like having the "Delphi" vs "Object Pascal" name argument...

[Sascha Willems]

Well, as you hinted at I encountered those problems long time ago (I guess the first time a non-german user used one of my games).

But there is a simple solution : Replace the decimal separator yourself before storing and loading values. This is what I now do in all my apps/games and this is how I do it :

Saving values :
- Convert floating point value to string
- Replace the current decimal separator (stored in System.DecimalSeparator) with a '.' (always, no matter what language)
- Save to e.g. XML-Node

Loading values :
- Get string
- Replace all '.' with current decimal separator. So for e.g. german OS '.' will be replaced with ',', for all langauges using '.' nothing is changed
- Convert back to float

Another possibility would be to what LifePower mentioned, though I prefer the above one as I usually save/load to/from XML and it doesn't matter what value type you store to a node. And also this allows me to format my floats before saving them.

[code_glitch]

Lifepower: If you query the NT kernel at the base of your XP and 7 installs and ask it to convert a string to a float, depending on the system language (in this case french) it returns the value it seems most appropriate for the langauge. I don't know if you knwo this but Microsoft makes a 'special' or rather custom built version of windows for french people to sell in france, german people for germany etc. Less so now with windows 7 and it being one installer where you choose the language, but many elements are similar to the garbage present on Windows 95 (I have a french install cd of that)... And that really only ran programs if they where french - and a LOT of stuff crashed.

And now you have seen code break because of this.

WILL: Windows language refers to the language the OS was aimed at, they make it easier to use by implementing umlauts and other grammatical symbols down to quite a low level - the . and , seperators being ported right down to NT level.

Sascha: I have to admit that that is quite a lot of work for just converting a string to float on different languages of an OS - I mean you'd expect those things to only tweak the UI not the actual way in which code runs!

I just started this thread because I know there are a lot of foreign languaged programmers here and just wanted them to know that sometimes languages do screw things up and as a reference so that no-one in the future goes through two days of garbage and have to install an XP VM in a different language just to try and debug a game...

[farcodev]

i also uses if DecimalSeparator=','
then DecimalSeparator:='.';

And have no problem when the game is switched to french.