HOWTO: Retrieve the Regional Settings Currency Symbol

ID: Q199244

The information in this article applies to:

Microsoft Visual Basic Professional and Enterprise Editions for Windows, versions 4.0, 5.0, 6.0

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 general information on how to use API functions from within Visual Basic, please see the following Microsoft Knowledge Base articles:

Q145679 HOWTO: Use the Registry API to Save and Retrieve Setting

Q178020 FILE: WIN32API.EXE: Updated Version of Win32api32.txt File

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 : kbAPI kbVBp kbGrpVBDB
Version : WINDOWS:4.0,5.0,6.0
Platform : WINDOWS
Issue type : kbhowto