Locale

Definitions

1. A set of settings describing a user's language, region, and cultural conventions, which software uses to format and interpret dates, times, numbers, currency, and text. Locales are named by identifiers such as en_US.UTF-8 in POSIX systems or BCP 47 language tags such as en-US and pt-BR on the web. On Unix, categories such as LC_TIME, LC_NUMERIC, LC_MONETARY, and LC_COLLATE can be set independently, with LANG as the default and LC_ALL overriding everything. The Unicode Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR) supplies the conventions most platforms use, and the ICU library implements them. Locale is a frequent source of bugs: a program that parses 1,5 correctly in a German locale reads it as fifteen in an American one, sorting order changes by language, and the Turkish dotted and dotless i breaks naive case conversion. The standard remedy is to use locale-aware formatting for display and locale-independent formats, such as ISO 8601 dates, for storage and data exchange.

   In plain English: Settings that tell software how to display dates, numbers, and text based on the user's country and language.

   Example: "The bug only happened in Germany because the locale uses commas as decimal separators."

Related Terms

• Vfmt
• Time Zone Handling
• Pretty Print
• Resource Bundle
• Satellite Assembly
• Whitespace
• Code Format
• Custom Formatter