LOCALE(M) XENIX System V LOCALE(M)
Name
locale - International locale.
Syntax
language [ _ [ territory ] [ . [ codeset ] ] ]
"C"
Description
The international locale is a definition of the local
conventions to be used by libraries (and hence utilities
and applications) for features whose behavior varies
internationally.
The locale is specified by a character string of the form
language_territory.codeset, where:
language represents both the language of text files being
used, and the preferred language for messages
(where the utility or application is capable of
displaying messages in many languages),
territory represents the geographical location (usually
the country) determining such factors as
currency and numeric formats, and
codeset represents the character set in use for the
internal representation of text.
The locale string ``french_canada.8859'' could therefore
represent a Canadian user using the French language,
processing data using the ISO 8859/1 standard international
character set.
Each element (language, territory or codeset) can be up to
14 characters long, and should use only alphanumeric ASCII
characters (see ascii(M)).
Note that the locale is not required to be completely
specified: territory and codeset are optional. When a
locale is incompletely specified, missing values are sought
in the following sequence:
1. For each subclass, such as LC_TIME , in an environment
variable of the same name as the subclass.
2. In the LANG environment variable.
3. In the file /etc/default/lang .
The special locale string ``C'', used to represent the
minimal environment needed for the C programming language,
is taken to be equivalent to ``english_us.ascii''.
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LOCALE(M) XENIX System V LOCALE(M)
The format of the file /etc/default/lang is at least one
line, of the form:
LANG="language_territory.codeset"
A partly specified locale string will be expanded to the
first LANG = entry in which the specified locale fields
match.
Thus if the /etc/default/lang file contains the following:
LANG=english_us.ascii
LANG=english_uk.8859
LANG=french_france.8859
A locale string ``english_uk'' will get expanded to
``english_uk.8859'', whereas a locale string ``french'' will
get expanded to ``french_france.8859''.
The information used to configure a particular locale is
generated by the utilities chrtbl(M), coltbl(M), mestbl(M),
montbl(M), numtbl(M) and timtbl(M). The output files
produced by these utilities (ctype, collate, currency,
messages, numeric and time respectively) must be installed
in the correct place in the directory structure
/usr/lib/lang. The correct directory name is found by
substituting the language, territory and codeset names into
the string ``/usr/lib/lang/language/territory/codeset''.
The files should be installed into this directory with their
existing file name (such as ctype).
A suggested naming convention for locales is as follows:
language
The name of the language, in English, such as:
english, french, german.
territory
The name of the nation, in English, such as: us, uk,
canada, france, germany, switzerland.
codeset
An identification of the codeset, such as: ascii,
8859.
See Also
chrtbl(M), coltbl(M), environ(M), mestbl(M), montbl(M),
numtbl(M), setlocale(S), timtbl(M)
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