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Using pseudo-locales for localizability testing

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Pseudo-locales are built in to Windows Vista and later, so that you can access them via National Language Support (NLS) APIs. You can use pseudo-locales to test the localizability of your applications. This topic includes procedures for using pseudo-codes.

Note

One task that needs special consideration when it comes to pseudo-locales is enumerating them; whether in your code, or in the regional and language options portion of the Control Panel. More on that later in this topic.

The names of the pseudo-locales are "qps-ploc", "qps-ploca", and "qps-plocm". As of Windows 10, the pseudo-locale "qps-Latn-x-sh" is also available.

Retrieve information about pseudo-locales

You can use GetLocaleInfoEx to retrieve information about a pseudo-locale. Pass into the function the name of the particular pseudo-locale (see the list of names above). For example, "qps-plocm" for the mirrored pseudo-locale.

wchar_t languageIdentifier[5];
int rc{ ::GetLocaleInfoEx(L"qps-plocm", LOCALE_ILANGUAGE, languageIdentifier, 5) };

Use LocaleNameToLCID with pseudo-locales

You can call the NLS mapping function LocaleNameToLCID with the name of a pseudo-locale.

LCID lcid{ ::LocaleNameToLCID(L"qps-plocm", 0) };

Enable pseudo-locales for enumeration

In your application, you can call EnumSystemLocalesEx to enumerate the locales that the system recognizes. The regional and language options portion of the Control Panel also calls EnumSystemLocalesEx to build the list of locales that it displays. However, by default, the four pseudo-locales listed above are not recognized by the system, so they won't be returned by EnumSystemLocalesEx. For systems from Windows Vista up to and including Windows 10, version 1709, the solution is to enable pseudo-locales by adding keys to the Windows Registry.

The edits are made under the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Nls key for the languages installed on the operating system. You can make these settings to enable the pseudo-locales. Each key shown below is the hexadecimal LCID corresponding to the pseudo-locale being enabled. Each value is of type string (REG_SZ).

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Nls\Locale]
"00000501"="1" // qps-ploc (Windows Vista and later)
"000005fe"="7" // qps-ploca (Windows Vista and later)
"00000901"="1" // qps-Latn-x-sh (Windows 10 and later)
"000009ff"="d" // qps-plocm (Windows Vista and later)

For Windows 10, version 1803, editing the Windows Registry like this has no effect. But you can still call the non-enumerating NLS APIs with the names of the pseudo-locales (see the code examples above) to populate your user interface (UI).