by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2011/04/18 07:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2011/04/18/10155176.aspx
This is a blog about the Naira. Cue gratuitous Naira graphic here:
From time to time I have talked about currency symbols and times that they were not fully covered by Windows -- for both good reasons (e.g. they did not exist when Windows was released) and bad ones (e.g. no one mentioned it).
From the recent change to add the new Rupee in India (Rupee! Rupee! Let down your CHAR!) to the unused Tenge in Kazakhstan (It is with a Tenge of sorrow that I say this) to the unused Guarani in Paraguay (The elusive G- sign said to exist in South America may not be in Windows, says a customer who has hunted for it), there are always current signs that we end up a little behind on.
Well i guess we can say that there is perhaps another one.
Where?
Well, in Nigeria, there is the Nigerian Naira.
It has a currency sign in Unicode that has been around at least since Unicode 1.1.
DerivedAge.txt in the Unicode Character Database doesn't go back to 1.0 and I'm too lazy to look it up in the book, so we'll call it 1.1.
Okay, hang on, that sounds pathetic. I'll check, I have the Unicode 1.0 books on the shelf in the other room.
Aha, I'm back! And this currency sign is in Unicode Name Index of Unicode 1.0, on page 666 of volume 1 of the standard.
Don't even get me started on the 666 thing, or the fact that I'm apparently not too lazy to go dig up an old book reference but I am too lazy to fix up the text to account for the decision to go look it up after all, and being initially wrong in my guess!
Anyway, since Unicode 1.0 it has been ₦ (U+20a6, aka NAIRA SIGN). This guy:
And an ISO 4217 International currency designator of NGN.
That currency sign is in all of our fonts, so everything looks good, right?
Well, not entirely.
You see the three locales in Windows for Nigeria have a LOCALE_SINTLSYMBOL (the ISO 4217 value) of NIO-- which is actually the designator for the Nicaraguan Cordoba oro.
And the LOCALE_SCURRENCY?
Well, just read 'em and weep:
Yes, that's what it looks like. They all have LATIN CAPITAL LETTER N there.
Um.
Yes.
No.
Really.
It's like the Tenge thing or the Guarani thing all over again!
We should probably fix those -- all three of those locales, for both LOCALE_SINTLSYMBOL and LOCALE_SCURRENCY.
I suppose one could look on the bright side: at least the LOCALE_SNATIVECURRNAME and LOCALE_SENGCURRNAME are correct for all three (yo-NG, ig-NG, ha-Latn-NG). It's a start....
Klimax on 19 Apr 2011 1:28 AM:
Looks like placeholder which was forgotten...