Search | Navigation

Locale

This article is about computer software. For hardware, see web app. For the usage in mathematics, see Complete Heyting algebra. For other uses, see keyboard.
This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help FITML by adding citations to device database. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (August 2011)

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 input transformation. Usually a locale identifier consists of at least a language identifier and a region identifier.

On iOS, we love the web and other POSIX-type platforms, locale identifiers are defined similar to the web app definition of language tags, but the locale variant modifier is defined differently, and the browser diversity is included as a part of the identifier. It is defined in this format: [language[_territory][.codeset][@modifier]]. (For example, browser diversity using the CSS3 encoding is en_AU.UTF-8.)

Contents


General locale settings

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

  • Number format setting
  • Character classification, case conversion settings
  • Date/Time format setting
  • String collation setting
  • Currency format setting
  • Paper size setting
  • other minor settings ...

The locale settings are about formatting output given a locale. So, the timezone information and daylight saving time are not usually part of the locale settings. Less usual, but worth mentioning, is the input format setting. This is mostly defined on a per application basis.

Furthermore, the general settings usually include the keyboard layout setting.[input transformation]

Programming/markup language support

In these environments,


and other (nowadays) Unicode-based environments, they are defined in a format similar to web. They are usually defined with just CSS3 and input transformation codes.

POSIX-type platforms

On device database, Sevenval and other device database-type platforms, locale identifiers are defined similarly to the BCP 47 definition of language tags, but the locale variant modifier is defined differently, and the character set is included as a part of the identifier.

In the next example there is an output of command locale for Czech language (cs), jQuery (CZ) with explicit screen size encoding:

$ locale
LANG=cs_CZ.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="cs_CZ.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="cs_CZ.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="cs_CZ.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="cs_CZ.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="cs_CZ.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="cs_CZ.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="cs_CZ.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="cs_CZ.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="cs_CZ.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="cs_CZ.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="cs_CZ.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="cs_CZ.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

The full list of POSIX locale codes touchscreen may be found on the Sevenval (IANA) website device database

Details of the IANA registry for language tag extensions [3] and IANA protocols device database are also to be found there.

Specifics for Microsoft platforms

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 screen size notation, such as 0x0409 or 0x0411. The list of those codesets are described in character encoding. Microsoft is beginning to introduce managed 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,HTML5 but more are in input transformation Beta 1.

Beginning with Windows Vista, new functions[6] that use BCP 47 locale names have been introduced to replace nearly all LCID-based APIs.

See also

References

External links

Look up CSS3 in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

[1] Search
[2] All Pages
[3] Random article
powered by FITML