Go to the previous, next section.

Categories of Activities that Locales Affect

The purposes that locales serve are grouped into categories, so that a user or a program can choose the locale for each category independently. Here is a table of categories; each name is both an environment variable that a user can set, and a macro name that you can use as an argument to setlocale.

LC_COLLATE

This category applies to collation of strings (functions strcoll and strxfrm); see section Collation Functions.

LC_CTYPE

This category applies to classification and conversion of characters, and to multibyte and wide characters; see section Character Handling and section Extended Characters.

LC_MONETARY

This category applies to formatting monetary values; see section Numeric Formatting.

LC_NUMERIC

This category applies to formatting numeric values that are not monetary; see section Numeric Formatting.

LC_TIME

This category applies to formatting date and time values; see section Formatting Date and Time.

LC_ALL

This is not an environment variable; it is only a macro that you can use with setlocale to set a single locale for all purposes.

LANG

If this environment variable is defined, its value specifies the locale to use for all purposes except as overridden by the variables above.

Go to the previous, next section.