Locale and Category Terminology

The terms locale and category relate to each other as follows:

• A locale includes specification of a language, territory, code set, and other features. The Simplified Chinese Solaris operating environment includes the following locales:

  • C--For the ASCII English environment, the locale must be set to C.

  • zh--For the Simplified Chinese environment in EUC, the locale must be set to zh.

  • zh.GBK--For the Simplified Chinese environment in GBK, the locale must be set to zh.GBK.

  • zh.UTF-8--For the Simplified Chinese environment in Unicode, the locale must be set to zh.UTF-8.

  • zh_CN.GB18030--For the Simplified Chinese environment in GB18030-2000, the locale must be set to zh_CN.GB18030.

• A category is a set of features that comprise a locale. For example, character displays or time/date representations, whose behavior depends on the locale. Simplified Chinese Solaris categories include the following:

  • LC_CTYPE sets the character-type for classification and conversion.

  • LC_TIME sets the locale for representation of date and time.

  • LC_NUMERIC sets the number representation locale (used also for I/O).

  • LC_MONETARY sets the currency representation locale.

  • LC_MESSAGES sets the language locale for messages to users.

  • LC_COLLATE sets the locale-dependent collation of strings.

The environmental variable LC_ALL explicitly sets the same locale for all categories; it has the highest priority. If categories or LC_ALL are not set, the LANG environmental variable will determine the category setting.