Locale Names, Languages, and Country/Region Strings

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06/05/2017

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The locale argument to the setlocale and _create_locale functions can be set by using the locale names, languages, country/region codes, and code pages that are supported by the Windows NLS API. The locale argument takes the following form:

  
locale :: "locale_name"  
        | "language[_country_region[.code_page]]"  
        | ".code_page"  
        | "C"  
        | ""  
        | NULL

The locale name form—for example, en-US for English (United States) or bs-Cyrl-BA for Bosnian (Cyrillic, Bosnia and Herzegovina)—is preferred. The set of locale names is described in Locale Names. For a list of supported locale names by Windows operating system version, see the Culture Name column of the National Language Support (NLS) API Reference. This resource lists the supported language, script, and region parts of the locale names. For information about the supported locale names that have non-default sort orders, see the Locale name column in Sort Order Identifiers.

The language[_country_region[.code_page]] form is stored in the locale setting for a category when a language string, or language string and country/region string, is used to create the locale. The set of supported language strings is described in Language Strings, and the list of supported country/region strings is listed in Country/Region Strings. If the specified language is not associated with the specified country/region, the default language for the specified country/region is stored in the locale setting. We do not recommend this form for locale strings embedded in code or serialized to storage, because these strings are more likely to be changed by an operating system update than the locale name form.

The code page is the ANSI/OEM code page that's associated with the locale. The code page is determined for you when you specify a locale by language or by language and country/region alone. The special value .ACP specifies the ANSI code page for the country/region. The special value .OCP specifies the OEM code page for the country/region. For example, if you specify "Greek_Greece.ACP" as the locale, the locale is stored as Greek_Greece.1253 (the ANSI code page for Greek), and if you specify "Greek_Greece.OCP" as the locale, it is stored as Greek_Greece.737 (the OEM code page for Greek). For more information about code pages, see Code Pages. For a list of supported code pages on Windows, see Code Page Identifiers.

If you use only the code page to specify the locale, the system default language and country/region are used. For example, if you specify ".1254" (ANSI Turkish) as the locale on a system that's configured for English (United States), the locale that's stored is English_United States.1254. We do not recommend this form, because it could lead to inconsistent behavior.

A locale value of C specifies the minimal ANSI conforming environment for C translation. The C locale assumes that every char data type is 1 byte and its value is always less than 256. If locale points to an empty string, the locale is the implementation-defined native environment.

You can specify all of the locale categories at the same time for the setlocale and _wsetlocale functions by using the LC_ALL category. The categories can all be set to the same locale, or you can set each category individually by using a locale argument that has this form:

LC_ALL_specifier :: locale  
        | [LC_COLLATE=locale][;LC_CTYPE=locale][;LC_MONETARY=locale][;LC_NUMERIC=locale][;LC_TIME=locale]

You can specify multiple category types, separated by semicolons. Category types that are not specified use the current locale setting. For example, this code sets the current locale for all categories to de-DE, and then sets the categories LC_MONETARY to en-GB and LC_TIME to es-ES:

_wsetlocale(LC_ALL, L"de-DE");

_wsetlocale(LC_ALL, L"LC_MONETARY=en-GB;LC_TIME=es-ES");

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