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_MESSAGES

This category applies to selecting the language used in the user interface for message translation.

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.

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