All the culture and language dependencies discussed in the previous section need to be represented in an operating system. This information is usually represented in a kind of language table, called a locale.
The X/Open consortium has standardized a variety of services for Native Language Support (NLS) in the programming language C. This standard is commonly known as XPG4. Internationalization services as well as localization support are included in X/Open's Native Language Support. The description below is based on this standard.
According to XPG4, the C locale is composed of several categories, which are given in Table 24.
LC_NUMERIC
Rules and symbols for numbers
LC_TIME
Values for date and time information
LC_MONETARY
Rules and symbols for monetary information
LC_CTYPE
Character classification and case conversion
LC_COLLATE
Collation sequence
LC_MESSAGES
Formats and values of messages
The external representation of a C locale is usually a file in UNIX. Other operating systems may use other representations. The external representation is transformed into an internal memory representation by calling the function setlocale(), as shown in Figure 4:
Inside a program, the C locale is represented by one or more global data structures. The C library provides a set of functions that use information from those global data structures to adapt their behavior to local conventions. Examples of these functions and the information they cover are listed in Table 25:
setlocale(), ...
Locale initialization and
language information
isalpha(), isupper(), isdigit(), ...
Character classification
strftime(), ...
Date and time functions
strfmon()
Monetary functions
printf(), scanf(), ...
Number parsing and formatting
strcoll(), wcscoll(), ...
String collation
mblen(), mbtowc(), wctomb(), ...
Multibyte functions
catopen(), catgets(), catclose()
Message retrieval