Locale

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This article is about internationalization and localization in computer software design and programming. For the use of "locale" as a place, see location and region. For the use of the term "locale" in order theory and pointless topology, see frames and locales.

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:

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]].

1 General locale settings
2 Programming/markup language support
3 Specifics for Microsoft platform(s)
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] General locale settings

These settings usually include the following display (output) format settings

Display language setting
Number formats setting
Date/Time formats setting
Timezone setting
Daylight saving time (DST) setting
Currency formats setting

The above formats may or may not include also an input format setting. The latter, that is the input format setting, is also mostly defined on a per application basis. The daylight saving time setting (DST) is derived from the Timezone Setting.

An exception to the rule is the

Keyboard layout setting

which declares only an input setting but not specifically an output setting, since most keyboards are not an output device.

[edit] Programming/markup language support

and other (nowadays) 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.

[edit] Specifics for Microsoft platform(s)

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. The list of those codesets are described in character encoding.
- Microsoft is beginning to introduce unmanaged code Application programming interfaces (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.
Beginning with Windows Vista, new functions that use RFC 4646 locale names have been introduced to replace nearly all LCID-based APIs.