National Language Support Guide and Reference

Understanding Locale Categories

A locale category is a particular grouping of language-specific and cultural-convention-specific data. For instance, data referring to date-and-time formatting, the names of the days of the week, names of the months, and other time-specific information is grouped into the LC_TIME category. Each category uses a set of keywords that describe the particulars of that locale subset.

The following standard categories can be defined in a locale definition source file:

LC_COLLATE

Defines character-collation or string-collation information.

LC_CTYPE

Defines character classification, case conversion, and other character attributes.

LC_MESSAGES

Defines the format for affirmative and negative responses.

LC_MONETARY

Defines rules and symbols for formatting monetary numeric information.

LC_NUMERIC

Defines rules and symbols for formatting nonmonetary numeric information.

LC_TIME

Defines a list of rules and symbols for formatting time and date information.