Article ID: 199244
Article Last Modified on 7/15/2004
APPLIES TO
- Microsoft Visual Basic 4.0 Professional Edition
- Microsoft Visual Basic 5.0 Professional Edition
- Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 Professional Edition
- Microsoft Visual Basic 4.0 Enterprise Edition
- Microsoft Visual Basic 5.0 Enterprise Edition
- Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 Enterprise Edition
This article was previously published under Q199244
SUMMARY
32-bit Visual Basic applications that are distributed in more than one country must rely upon the Regional Settings specifications of the Windows Control Panel for retrieving the appropriate currency symbol to display to the user. Retrieving the currency symbol involves calling the GetLocaleInfo function from the 32-bit Windows API function library.
MORE INFORMATION
The following code can be used to retrieve the currency symbol as specified in the Regional Settings of the Windows Control Panel. The GetUserDefaultLCID() function retrieves the default locale for the current user and the GetLocaleInfo() function retrieves information relating to the specified locale. Keep in mind that Visual Basic 6.0 has built in functions to automatically format numbers with the currency symbol as specified in the Control Panel's Regional Settings. While this code works in Visual Basic 6.0, the primary audience for this article are 32-bit Visual Basic 4.0 and Visual Basic 5.0 developers.
Executing this code stores the user default currency symbol in the Symbol string:
Option Explicit
Private Declare Function GetLocaleInfo Lib "kernel32" _
Alias "GetLocaleInfoA" (ByVal Locale As Long, _
ByVal LCType As Long, ByVal lpLCData As String, _
ByVal cchData As Long) As Long
Private Declare Function GetUserDefaultLCID% Lib "kernel32" ()
Private Const LOCALE_SCURRENCY = &H14
Dim Symbol As String
Dim iRet1 As Long
Dim iRet2 As Long
Dim lpLCDataVar As String
Dim Pos As Integer
Dim Locale as Long
Locale = GetUserDefaultLCID()
iRet1 = GetLocaleInfo(Locale, LOCALE_SCURRENCY, lpLCDataVar, 0)
Symbol = String$(iRet1, 0)
iRet2 = GetLocaleInfo(Locale, LOCALE_SCURRENCY, Symbol, iRet1)
Pos = InStr(Symbol, Chr$(0))
If Pos > 0 Then
Symbol = Left$(Symbol, Pos - 1)
End If
REFERENCES
For additional information about how to use API functions from within Visual Basic, click the article numbers below to view the articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
145679 How To Use the Registry API to Save and Retrieve Setting
For information on how to use the API Viewer add-in that ships with Visual Basic, please see "Accessing The Microsoft Windows API" in the Visual Basic Books Online.
For more information about locale identifiers, please see "Visual Basic Programmer's Guide to the Win32 API", by Daniel Appleman, PC Magazine Press
Additional query words: currency symbol regional settings locale
Keywords: kbhowto kbapi KB199244
