textdomain(3) — Linux manual page

TEXTDOMAIN(3)            Library Functions Manual           TEXTDOMAIN(3)

NAME         top

       textdomain - set domain for future gettext() calls

SYNOPSIS         top

       #include <libintl.h>

       char * textdomain (const char * domainname);

DESCRIPTION         top

       The textdomain function sets or retrieves the current message
       domain.

       A message domain is a set of translatable msgid messages. Usually,
       every software package has its own message domain. The domain name
       is used to determine the message catalog where a translation is
       looked up; it must be a non-empty string.

       The current message domain is used by the gettext, ngettext
       functions, and by the dgettext, dcgettext, dngettext and
       dcngettext functions when called with a NULL domainname argument.

       If domainname is not NULL, the current message domain is set to
       domainname. The string the function stores internally is a copy of
       the domainname argument.

       If domainname is NULL, the function returns the current message
       domain.

RETURN VALUE         top

       If successful, the textdomain function returns the current message
       domain, after possibly changing it. The resulting string is valid
       until the next textdomain call and must not be modified or freed.
       If a memory allocation failure occurs, it sets errno to ENOMEM and
       returns NULL.

ERRORS         top

       The following error can occur, among others:

       ENOMEM Not enough memory available.

BUGS         top

       The return type ought to be const char *, but is char * to avoid
       warnings in C code predating ANSI C.

SEE ALSO         top

       gettext(3), ngettext(3), bindtextdomain(3),
       bind_textdomain_codeset(3)

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the gettext (message translation) project.
       Information about the project can be found at 
       ⟨http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/⟩.  If you have a bug report
       for this manual page, see
       ⟨http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/gettext/⟩.  This page was
       obtained from the tarball gettext-0.26.tar.gz fetched from
       ⟨https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gettext/⟩ on 2025-08-11.  If you discover
       any rendering problems in this HTML version of the page, or you
       believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for the page,
       or you have corrections or improvements to the information in this
       COLOPHON (which is not part of the original manual page), send a
       mail to man-pages@man7.org

GNU gettext 0.26                 May 2001                   TEXTDOMAIN(3)

Pages that refer to this page: bindtextdomain(3),  bind_textdomain_codeset(3),  gettext(3)

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