Locale

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In computing, locale is a set of parameters that defines the user's language, country and any special variant preferences that the user wants to see in their user interface. Usually a locale identifier consists of at least a language identifier and a region identifier.

Locale identifiers can be defined in several ways:

• Locale Identifier (LCID) for unmanaged code on Microsoft Windows, a number such as 1033 for English (United States) or 1041 for Japanese (Japan). These numbers consist of a language code (lower 10 bits) and culture code (upper bits) and are therefore often written in hexadecimal notation, such as 0x0409 or 0x0411.
• In XML, Microsoft .Net, Java and other Unicode-based environments, they are defined in a format similar to RFC 3066 or one of its successors. They are usually defined with just ISO 639 and ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes.
  • Microsoft is beginning to introduce unmanaged code APIs for .NET that use this format. One of the first to be generally released is a function to mitigate issues with internationalized domain names [1], but more are in Windows Vista Beta 1.
• On Unix, Linux and other POSIX-type platforms, they are defined similar to the RFC 3066 definition, but the locale variant modifier is defined differently, and the charset is included as a part of the identifier. It is defined in this format:

[language[_territory][.codeset][@modifier]].

[edit] See also

• Internationalization and localization
• ISO 639 language codes
• ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes
• Common Locale Data Repository
• Date and time notation by country
• AppLocale

[edit] External links

• RFC 3066
• Registration of Special RFC 3066 Language Tags
• Common Locale Data Repository
• java.util.Locale Javadoc API documentation
• LCID information from Microsoft
• POSIX Environment Variables
• Low Level Technical details on defining a POSIX locale
• ICU Locale Explorer
• Debian Wiki on Locales
• Article "The Standard C++ Locale" by Nathan C. Myers
• Internationalization services - Python Library Reference
• locale(7): Description of multi-language support - Linux man page

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