Locale

The locale is a set that contains the locale parameter (location parameter ) for computer programs.

These include primarily the user interface language, the country and Settings character set, keyboard layout, number, currency, date and time formats. A connection set is usually clearly identified with a code that includes mostly language and country.

In different operating systems, there are several concepts for field settings:

Windows

Under Microsoft Windows locale parameter by a number ( eg 0x0407 for German or 0x0409 for English / U.S., other countries codes on the web link ) addressed and contain data about display formats, code pages and keyboard layouts. Windows programs have, however, generally no way for subsequent translation without knowledge of the program source code.

. NET

In Microsoft's. NET Framework applications, there are a variety of settings that are stored in XML structures.

POSIX

Under POSIX platforms such as Linux, the translation functions using the the locale functions in the standard C library can be implemented and, therefore, are in many programs. The locale is about the environment variables LANG and LC_ * (eg LC_TIME for date format) fixed and can therefore vary from user to user and even from program to program. Locale names usually have the format [language [ _territory ] [. Codeset ] [@ modifier] ]. Language and area are two -letter ISO -639 or ISO 3166 code represents (eg de_DE for German / Germany or de_AT for German / Austria ). The modifier is intended to select category-specific variants, eg a currency, date format or sort order. In practice, this option is but the absence of pre-defined locales usually not available.

Mac OS X

Under Mac OS X you can set location settings and other parameters in ~ / .MacOSX / environment.plist, in the following example to UTF -8:

LC_ALL < / key> en_US.UTF -8 < / dict > If the file does not exist, the directory and file can be easily created.

Java

The Java platform is from the locale features of the java.util.Locale class. Location settings are identified here with an identification of language and country ( for example, en_US for German / Germany or de_AT for German / Austria ). In addition, the attribute Variant also be referred to regions (see also ISO 3166-2: AT, ISO 3166-2: CH, ISO 3166-2: DE ). The internationalization and localization on the basis of so-called resource bundles ( " resource bundle "), which are mapped into Java with the java.util.ResourceBundle class.

CLDR

The Common Locale Data Repository is a project that locales can be provides for many languages ​​and used by the libraries of different programming languages.