About Locales

A locale identifies language-specific information about how users in a specific region, culture, or custom expect data to be presented. Locales define how data in different languages is interpreted, sorted, and collated.Directory Server supports multiple languages through the use of locales.

A locale specifies the following information.

Code page

The code page is an internal table used by an operating system to relate keyboard keys to character fonts displayed on a screen. A locale can indicate what code page an application should select for interaction with an end user.

Collation order

The collation order provides information about how the characters of a given language should be sorted. The collation order specifies the following information:

• The sequence of the letters in the alphabet

• How to compare letters with accents to letters without accents

• Whether there are characters that can be ignored when comparing strings

• The direction, left to right, right to left, or up and down, in which the language is read

Character type

The character type distinguishes alphabetic characters from numeric or other characters. It defines the mapping of uppercase letters to lowercase letters. For example, in some languages, the pipe character (|) is considered punctuation, while in other languages it is considered as alphabetic.

Monetary format

The monetary format specifies the following information: the monetary symbol used in a region, whether the symbol goes before or after its value, and how monetary units are represented.

Time and date formats

The time and date formats determine the appearance of times and dates in a region. The time format indicates whether the locale uses a 12–hour clock or 24-hour clock. The date format includes both the short date order and the long date format, and include the names of months and days of the week in each language.