Behavior Affected by Locales

Different cultures often use different conventions for writing the date and time, formatting numbers, delimiting words and phrases, and quoting material. Throughout the system, a locale determines the behavior of the following items:

• Encoding and processing of text data.

• Identifying the language and encoding of resource files.

• Rendering and layout of text strings.

• Interchanging text that is used 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.

• Regular expression handling specific to the locale.

• 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. Doing so eliminates the 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.