Red Hat DIRECTORY SERVER 7.1, Administrator'S Manual

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Identifying Supported Locales
614 Red Hat Directory Server Administrator’s Guide • May 2005
In addition, the locale information indicates what code page should be used to
represent a given language. A code page is an internal table that the operating
system uses to relate keyboard keys to character font screen displays.
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 to 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.
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).