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Internationalization

Discussion

This section describes C language functions that you can use to write UNIX applications that will process input and generate output in a user's native language or cultural environment. It shows you how to use these functions and some associated commands to create programs that make no assumptions about the language environments in which they will be run, and so are portable across these environments.

The basic idea behind the internationalization interface is that at any time a C program has a current ``locale'': a collection of information on which it relies for language- or culture-dependent processing. This information is supplied by implementations and seen by the program only at run time. Because the information is stored externally to the program, applications need not make -- and should not make if they mean to be portable -- any assumptions about

A typical locale, then, consists of an encoding scheme; databases that describe the conventions appropriate to some nationality, culture, and language; and a file which you supply, that contains your program's message strings in whatever language the locale implements.
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