Region (Numeric) Support for datatool v3.0+ (datatool-regions)

Version 1.0 (2025-03-01)

Author: Nicola L. C. Talbot dickimaw-books.com

Licence: LPPL

Home Page: https://github.com/nlct/datatool-regions

Required Packages: datatool (3.0+), tracklang (1.6.4+)

The datatool-regions bundle provides the language-independent region ldf files for the datatool package (v3.0+). The *.ldf files should all be placed on TeX's path.

These files don't require any explicit loading. They will automatically be input by datatool-base.sty (or relevant supplementary package) if they are found and required by the tracklang localisation settings. See the datatool v3.0+ and tracklang user manuals for further details.

The region files deal with defining (if applicable) the currency symbol and switching to the region's currency in the region's hook. Region files may additionally (if not dependent on the language) set the number group and decimal characters, and provide functions for parsing numeric dates and times.

Note that datatool-base.sty deals with appending the region's hook to the applicable language captions hook, if available.

The language support is distributed separately. Any setting that depends on both language and region should be supplied with the applicable language bundle. This may occur for regions with multiple official languages, where the number formatting or date/time parsing depends on the language within the region. For example, datatool-english provides datatool-en-CA.ldf and datatool-en-ZA.ldf in addition to datatool-english.ldf.

If a pre-3.0 version of datatool is installed, these ldf files will be ignored.

Example:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[locales={en-GB}]{datatool-base}% v3.0
\begin{document}
Currency: \DTLdecimaltocurrency{12345.67}{\price}\price.

\DTLmul\result{\price}{-0.5}\result.
Data type: \DTLgetDataTypeName{\DTLdatumtype{\result}}.
Numeric value: \DTLdatumvalue{\result}.
\end{document}

If datatool-regions is correctly installed, the result will be:

Currency: £12,345.67.

> −£6,172.84. Data type: currency. Numeric value: -6172.835.

In most cases the language and region are not inter-connected. This means that you would get the same result (in terms of the formatting and parsing of the numbers and currency) for the above with locales={cy-GB}, locales={gd-GB}, locales={ga-GB}, locales={sco-GB}, or simply locales={GB}.

The source code is on GitHub at github.com/nlct/datatool-regions. If you want to add new region files, you can use the Perl script src/createregion.pl in the GitHub repository. It's an interactive command line script that doesn't take any arguments and will create a region ldf file based on your responses. You can then add the new ldf via a pull request.

See also:

• datatool-english (GitHub)
• Localisation with datatool v3.0+

This material is subject to the LaTeX Project Public License. See http://www.ctan.org/license/lppl1.3 for the details of that license.