AIX Version 4.3 Differences Guide

The new locales must be able to effectively support the dual currency situation
that will exist between the years 1999 - 2002. During this time period, the locale
definition will still use the country’s national currency definition as the default, but
a mechanism is provided to switch the LC_MONETARY definition so that the Euro
currency formatting is used instead of the country’s national currency formatting
rules.
For those customers that have applications that will not support multi-byte
encodings such as UTF-8, a Euro single-byte migration option is provided as well.
This option is based on the Windows 1252 placement of the Euro at 0x80 to
provide the best compatibility with Windows 98/NT clients.
10.5.2 Local Definitions for the UTF-8 Code Set
A locale is made up of the language, territory, and code set combination used to
identify a set of language conventions. The language specific information is
accessed through the locale database that is compiled by the localedef
command. The localedef command takes three different files as input:
• One file describes the local methods to be overridden in respect to the
defaults when constructing a locale.
• The second file contains a mapping from the character symbols and collating
element symbols to actual character encodings.
• Finally, the language conventions are grouped in six categories to include
information about collation, case conversion, and character classification, the
language of message catalogs, date-and-time representation, the monetary
symbol, and numeric representation.
The local category source definitions are given in the third input file, the local
definition source file.
The following categories can be defined for a given local:
LC_COLLATE Determines character-collation or string-collation information.
LC_CTYPE Determines character classification, case conversion, and
other character attributes.
LC_MESSAGES Determines the format for affirmative and negative
responses.
LC_MONETARY Determines rules and symbols for formatting monetary
numeric information.
LC_NUMERIC Determines rules and symbols for formatting and
non-monetary numeric information.
LC_TIME Determines a list of rules and symbols for formatting time and
date information.
NLS uses the environment variables LC_COLLATE, LC_CTYPE,
LC_MESSAGES, LC_MONETARY, LC_NUMERIC and LC_TIME to define the
current values for their respective categories and to influence the selection of
locales. In addition to the previously mentioned medium priority class
environment variables, the LANG low priority class environment variable
specifies the installation default locale. You can change the LANG variable at any
time. Furthermore, the high priority class variable LC_ALL is provided that takes
precedence above all the other NLS environment variables mentioned before.
National Language Support 253