Localization

Introduction

The functions defined in the header file <locale.h> are used to tailor significant portions of the C run-time environment to national conventions for punctuation of decimal numbers, currency, and so on. This tailoring provides the capability for writing programs that are portable across many countries. For example, some countries separate the whole and fractional parts of a number with a comma instead of a period. Alphabetization, currency notation, dates, and times are all expressed differently in different countries. Each set of definitions for culture-dependent issues is called a locale, and each locale has a name that is a null-terminated string.

This chapter introduces fundamental concepts of localization and the basic structure used in localization functions, and discusses the three nonstandard locales supplied by the SAS/C Library. Descriptions of the standard localization functions (including strcoll and strxfrm ) follow.

For details on how to create your own locales, see User-Added Locales.

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