Overview of the Solaris 8 Locales

Multiple environments exist within the Solaris operating system for support of different national languages. Each of these national environments is called a locale, which considers the language, its characters, fonts, and the customs used to input and format data.

A locale defines the behavior of a program at run time according to the language and cultural conventions of a user's geographical area. Throughout the system, locales affect 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