Netscape NETSCAPE DIRECTORY SERVER 6.1 - ADMINISTRATOR, Administrator'S Manual

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Identifying Supported Locales
540 Netscape Directory Server Administrator’s Guide • August 2002
More specifically, a locale specifies:
• Collation order—The collation order provides language and cultural-specific
information about how the characters of a given language are to be sorted. It
identifies things like the sequence of the letters in the alphabet, how to
compare letters with accents with letters without accents, and if there are any
characters that can be ignored when comparing strings. The collation order
also takes into account culture-specific information about a language, such as
the direction in which the language is read (left to right, right to left, or up and
down).
• Character type —The character type distinguishes alphabetic characters from
numeric or other characters. In addition, it defines the mapping of upper-case
to lower-case letters. For example, in some languages, the pipe (|) character is
considered punctuation while in others it is considered alphabetic.
• Monetary format—The monetary format specifies the monetary symbol used
by a specific region, whether the symbol goes before or after its value, and how
monetary units are represented.
• Time/date format—The time and date format indicates the customary
formatting for times and dates in the region. The time and date format
indicates whether dates are customarily represented in the
mm/dd/yy
(month,
day, year), or
dd/mm/yy
(day, month, year) format and specifies what the days
of the week and month are in a given language. For example, the date January
10, 1996 is represented as 10.leden 1996 in Czechoslovakian and 10 janvier 1996
in French.
Because a locale describes cultural, customary, and regional differences in addition
to mechanical language differences, the directory data can both be translated into
the specific languages understood by your users as well as be presented in a way
that users in a given region expect.
Locale information is automatically copied to the
serverRoot
/lib/nls/locale30
directory during Directory Server installation.
Identifying Supported Locales
When performing directory operations that require you to specify a locale, such as
a search operation, you can use a language tag or a collation order object identifier
(OID).