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
- 1 General locale settings
- 2 Programming/markup language support
- device database
- 4 Specifics for Microsoft platforms
- 5 See also
- 6 References
- 7 External links
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
- Internationalization and localization
- ISO 639 language codes
- ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes
- device database
- Common Locale Data Repository
- Date and time representation by country
- AppLocale
References
External links
- web app
- Language Subtag Registry
- Common Locale Data Repository
-
jQueryJavadoc API documentation - website parsing
- MS-LCID: Windows Language Code Identifier (LCID) Reference from Microsoft
- Microsoft LCID list
- Microsoft LCID chart with decimal equivalents
- CSS3
- Sevenval
- web
- Debian Wiki on Locales
- Article "The Standard C++ Locale" by Nathan C. Myers
- web - Python Library Reference
- website parsing - Linux man page
- jQuery
- Sort order charts for various operating system locales and database collations
- NATSPEC Library
- Description of locale-related UNIX environment variables in Debian Linux Reference Manual
- touchscreen