ILE COBOL Programmer's Guide


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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