Cultural Conventions

Different cultures use different conventions for writing the date, the time, numbers, currency, delimiting words and phrases, and quoting material.

A locale defines the behavior of a program at runtime according to a language or cultural region's conventions. Throughout the system, a locale determines the behavior of the following:

• Encoding and processing of text data

• Identifying the language and encoding of resource files and their text values

• Rendering and layout of text strings

• Interchanging text that is used for interclient text communication

• Encoding and decoding for interclient text communication

• Selecting the input method (that is, which codeset is generated) and the processing of text data

• Font and icon files that are culturally specific

• Actions and file types

• User Interface Definition (UID) files

• Date and time formats

• Numeric formats

• Monetary formats

• Collation order

• Format for informative and diagnostic messages and interactive responses

The Solaris environment separates language and culture-dependent information from the application and saves it outside the application.

By separating the language and culture-dependent information from the application, the developer does not need to translate, rewrite, or recompile the application for each market. The only requirement to enter a new market is to localize the external information to the local language and customs.

Locale Categories

The locale categories are as follows:

• LC_CTYPE

  Controls the behavior of character handling functions

• LC_TIME

  Specifies date and time formats, including month names, days of the week, and common full and abbreviated representations

• LC_MONETARY

  Specifies monetary formats. Few SunOS system commands or library routines actually use this category

• LC_NUMERIC

  Specifies the decimal separator (or radix character) and the thousands separator

• LC_COLLATE

  Specifies the sorting order for a locale and the string conversions required to attain this ordering

• LC_MESSAGES

  Specifies the language in which the localized messages are written

• LO_LTYPE

  Specifies the layout engine that provides information about language rendering. Language rendering (or text rendering) consists of text shaping and directionality.