X Locale Management

X locale supports one or more of the locales defined by the host environment. The Xlib conforms to the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) C library, and the locale announcement method is the setlocale() function. This function configures the locale operation of both the host C library and Xlib. The operation of Xlib is governed by the LC_CTYPE category; this is called the current locale.

The XSupportsLocale() function is used to determine whether the current locale is supported by X.

The client is responsible for selecting its locale and X modifiers. Clients should provide a means for the user to override the clients' locale selection at client invocation. Most single-display X clients operate in a single locale for both X and the host-processing environment. They configure the locale by calling three functions: setlocale(), XSupportsLocale(), and XSetLocaleModifiers().

The semantics of certain categories of X internationalization capabilities can be configured by setting modifiers. Modifiers are named by implementation-dependent and locale-specific strings. The only standard use for this capability at present is selecting one of several styles of keyboard input methods.

The XSetLocaleModifiers() function is used to configure Xlib locale modifiers for the current locale.

The recommended procedure for clients initializing their locale and modifiers is to obtain locale and modifier announcers separately from one of the following prioritized sources:

1. A command-line option

2. A resource

3. The empty string (" ")

The first of these that is defined should be used.

When a locale command-line option or locale resource is defined, the effect should be to set all categories to the specified locale, overriding any category-specific settings in the local host environment.