Red Hat DIRECTORY SERVER 8.0, Administration Manual

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Appendix D. Internationalization
Red Hat Directory Server allows users to store, manage, and search for entries and their associated
attributes in a number of different languages. An internationalized directory can be an invaluable
corporate resource, providing employees and business partners with immediate access to the
information they need in languages they understand.
Directory Server supports all international charactersets by default because directory data is stored
in UTF-8. Further, Directory Server can use specified matching rules and collation orders based on
language preferences in search operations.
NOTE
ASCII characters are required for attribute and object class names.
D.1. About Locales
Directory Server provides support for multiple languages through the use of
locales
. A locale identifies
language-specific information about how users of a specific region, culture, or custom expect data to
be presented, including how data of a given language is interpreted and how data is to be sorted, or
collated
.
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 defines four things:
• 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. For example, in some languages, the pipe (|) character is considered punctuation while
in others it is considered alphabetic. In addition, it defines the mapping of upper-case to lower-case
letters.
• 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.