INTRO (7) NetBSD Miscellaneous Information Manual INTRO (7 ...

NLS (7) NetBSD Miscellaneous Information Manual NLS (7)
NAME
NLS —Native Language Support Overview
DESCRIPTION
Native Language Support (NLS) provides commands for a single worldwide operating system base. An
internationalized system has no built-in assumptions or dependencies on language-specific or cultural-specific
conventions such as:
• Character classifications
• Character comparison rules
• Character collation order
• Numeric and monetary formatting
• Date and time formatting
• Message-text language
• Character sets
All information pertaining to cultural conventions and language is obtained at program run time.
“Internationalization” (often abbreviated “i18n”) refers to the operation by which system software is developed
to support multiple cultural-specific and language-specific conventions. This is a generalization process
by which the system is untied from calling only English strings or other English-specific conventions.
“Localization” (often abbreviated “l10n”) refers to the operations by which the user environment is customized
to handle its input and output appropriate for specific language and cultural conventions. This is a
specialization process, by which generic methods already implemented in an internationalized system are
used in specific ways. The formal description of cultural conventions for some country, together with all
associated translations targeted to the native language, is called the “locale”.
NetBSD provides extensive support to programmers and system developers to enable internationalized software
to be developed. NetBSD also supplies a large variety of locales for system localization.
Localization of Information
All locale information is accessible to programs at run time so that data is processed and displayed correctly
for specific cultural conventions and language.
Alocale is divided into categories. A category is a group of language-specific and culture-specific conventions
as outlined in the list above. ISO C specifies the following six standard categories supported by
NetBSD:
LC_COLLATE
LC_CTYPE
LC_MESSAGES
LC_MONETARY
LC_NUMERIC
LC_TIME
string-collation order information
character classification, case conversion, and other character attributes
the format for affirmative and negative responses
rules and symbols for formatting monetary numeric information
rules and symbols for formatting nonmonetary numeric information
rules and symbols for formatting time and date information
Localization of the system is achieved bysetting appropriate values in environment variables to identify
which locale should be used. The environment variables have the same names as their respective locale categories.
Additionally, the LANG, LC_ALL, and NLSPATH environment variables are used. The NLSPATH
environment variable specifies a colon-separated list of directory names where the message catalog files of
the NLS database are located. The LC_ALL and LANG environment variables also determine the current
locale.
The values of these environment variables contains a string format as:
language[_territory][.codeset][@modifier]
NetBSD 3.0 February 21, 2007 1