Locales

Locales

An internationalized system is capable of presenting and receiving data understandably in a number of different formats, cultures, languages, and character sets. An application running in an internationalized system must indicate how it wants the system to behave. IRIX uses the concept of a locale to convey that information.

A process can have only one locale at a time. Most internationalization interfaces rely on the locale of the current process being set properly; the locale governs the behavior of certain library routines.

This section covers the following topics:

"Setting the Current Locale" explains categories, locales, strings, location of locale-specific data, and locale naming conventions.
"Limitations of the Locale System" describes multilingual support, misuses of locales, and encoding.

You can find additional information in "Locale-Specific Behavior", which describes native language support, regular expressions, and cultural data.

Setting the Current Locale
Limitations of the Locale System