Working With Locales
A locale identifies formatting information that is
culturally specific. For a specific cultural region, this information describes
the valid alphabetic characters, collating sequence, number formats and currency
amounts, and date and time formats.
Locale information is grouped into locale categories that control specific
aspects of the runtime of a program. These locale categories are:
- Locale-Category Name
- Behavior Affected
- LC_CTYPE
- Defines character types, such as upper-case, lower-case, space, digit,
and punctuation. Affects the behavior of locale-based numeric-edited, date,
and time items, as well as locale-based intrinsic functions.
- LC_COLLATE
- Defines the collating sequence.
- LC_TIME
- Defines the date and time conventions, such as calendar used, time zone,
and days of the week. Affects the behavior of date and time data items whose
format is based on a locale, and intrinsic functions that return date and
time items.
- LC_NUMERIC
- Defines numeric formats.
- LC_MONETARY
- Defines the monetary names, symbols, punctuation, and other details.
Affects locale-based numeric-edited items.
- LC_MESSAGES
- Defines the format for informative and diagnostic messages, and interactive
responses.
- LC_TOD
- Defines time zone difference, time zone name, and Daylight Savings Time
start and end (iSeries-specific). It also affects the behavior of locale-based
time data items, intrinsic functions that return time items, and intrinsic
functions that format times based on locales.
- LC_ALL
- All locale categories, including all of those previously defined in
this list. This category may include categories and cultural elements not
used by ILE COBOL.
The locale categories LC_MESSAGES, LC_COLLATE, and LC_NUMERIC are not used
directly by ILE COBOL. However, these categories can be SET and queried, in order
that applications can use it.
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