Identifying Supported Locales540 Netscape Directory Server Administrator’s Guide • August 2002More specifically, a locale specifies:• Collation order—The collation order provides language and cultural-specificinformation about how the characters of a given language are to be sorted. Itidentifies things like the sequence of the letters in the alphabet, how tocompare letters with accents with letters without accents, and if there are anycharacters that can be ignored when comparing strings. The collation orderalso takes into account culture-specific information about a language, such asthe direction in which the language is read (left to right, right to left, or up anddown).• Character type —The character type distinguishes alphabetic characters fromnumeric or other characters. In addition, it defines the mapping of upper-caseto lower-case letters. For example, in some languages, the pipe (|) character isconsidered punctuation while in others it is considered alphabetic.• Monetary format—The monetary format specifies the monetary symbol usedby a specific region, whether the symbol goes before or after its value, and howmonetary units are represented.• Time/date format—The time and date format indicates the customaryformatting for times and dates in the region. The time and date formatindicates 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 daysof the week and month are in a given language. For example, the date January10, 1996 is represented as 10.leden 1996 in Czechoslovakian and 10 janvier 1996in French.Because a locale describes cultural, customary, and regional differences in additionto mechanical language differences, the directory data can both be translated intothe specific languages understood by your users as well as be presented in a waythat users in a given region expect.Locale information is automatically copied to the serverRoot/lib/nls/locale30directory during Directory Server installation.Identifying Supported LocalesWhen performing directory operations that require you to specify a locale, such asa search operation, you can use a language tag or a collation order object identifier(OID).
