### International Text and Applications

The International Framework provides classes for creating international applications and manipulating international text. International applications are those that can be localized for different languages and geographic regions without accessing the source code. International text may consist of translated text strings as well as different character sets.

#### Locales

A locale is typically defined by a combination of language and geographical region, but other elements, such as date, time, currency, and number formats, may also help to form the locale definition.

The locale mechanism provides access for localizable resources. Localizable resources include any objects--such as transcoders, collation objects, number formatters, date formatters, and time zones--that might change to support different languages or geographic regions. For example, collation ordering rules for text sorting are associated with particular languages, while date, time, and currency formats are more closely associated with particular regions.

ILocaleKey lets you access both host-specific and portable resources associated with a particular locale. Neither ILocaleKey nor the particular locale in question owns the objects associated with it.

#### Collation

Collation classes enable both language-sensitive and language-insensitive string comparison. For language-sensitive comparison of Unicode text strings, the collation classes use the alphabetical ordering rules of a natural language instead of the numeric values of the character encoding system.

#### Transcoding

Using a set of mapping rules to convert text data between two character encoding standards is called transcoding. The Open Class transcoding classes enable conversion of Unicode character data to and from other character encoding systems, including ASCII and the code pages used in Microsoft environments. The transcoding classes also handle the conversion of special characters.

The LOCPATH environment variable identifies the location of international resources on your system. If LOCPATH is not set before using these classes on AIX or OS/2, then the "C" locale is used. You do not need to set this variable on Windows platforms.

Locale Names
Transcoder Names