class Locale

Defined at line 195 of file ../../third_party/icu/default/source/common/unicode/locid.h

Locale

object represents a specific geographical, political,

or cultural region. An operation that requires a

Locale

to perform

its task is called

locale-sensitive

and uses the

Locale

to tailor information for the user. For example, displaying a number

is a locale-sensitive operation--the number should be formatted

according to the customs/conventions of the user's native country,

region, or culture.

The Locale class is not suitable for subclassing.

You can create a

Locale

object using the constructor in

this class:

Locale( const char* language,

const char* country,

const char* variant);

The first argument to the constructors is a valid

<STRONG

>ISO

Language Code.

</STRONG

> These codes are the lower-case two-letter

codes as defined by ISO-639.

You can find a full list of these codes at:

<BR

http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/

The second argument to the constructors is a valid

<STRONG

>ISO Country

Code.

</STRONG

> These codes are the upper-case two-letter codes

as defined by ISO-3166.

You can find a full list of these codes at a number of sites, such as:

<BR

http://www.iso.org/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma/index.html

The third constructor requires a third argument--the

<STRONG

>Variant.

</STRONG

The Variant codes are vendor and browser-specific.

For example, use REVISED for a language's revised script orthography, and POSIX for POSIX.

Where there are two variants, separate them with an underscore, and

put the most important one first. For

example, a Traditional Spanish collation might be referenced, with

"ES", "ES", "Traditional_POSIX".

Because a

Locale

object is just an identifier for a region,

no validity check is performed when you construct a

Locale

If you want to see whether particular resources are available for the

Locale

you construct, you must query those resources. For

example, ask the

NumberFormat

for the locales it supports

using its

getAvailableLocales

method.

<BR

<STRONG

>Note:

</STRONG

> When you ask for a resource for a particular

locale, you get back the best available match, not necessarily

precisely what you asked for. For more information, look at

ResourceBundle

The

Locale

class provides a number of convenient constants

that you can use to create

Locale

objects for commonly used

locales. For example, the following refers to a

Locale

object

for the United States:

Locale::getUS()

Once you've created a

Locale

you can query it for information about

itself. Use

getCountry

to get the ISO Country Code and

getLanguage

to get the ISO Language Code. You can

use

getDisplayCountry

to get the

name of the country suitable for displaying to the user. Similarly,

you can use

getDisplayLanguage

to get the name of

the language suitable for displaying to the user. Interestingly,

the

getDisplayXXX

methods are themselves locale-sensitive

and have two versions: one that uses the default locale and one

that takes a locale as an argument and displays the name or country in

a language appropriate to that locale.

ICU provides a number of classes that perform locale-sensitive

operations. For example, the

NumberFormat

class formats

numbers, currency, or percentages in a locale-sensitive manner. Classes

such as

NumberFormat

have a number of convenience methods

for creating a default object of that type. For example, the

NumberFormat

class provides these three convenience methods

for creating a default

NumberFormat

object:

UErrorCode success = U_ZERO_ERROR;

Locale myLocale;

NumberFormat *nf;

nf = NumberFormat::createInstance( success ); delete nf;

nf = NumberFormat::createCurrencyInstance( success ); delete nf;

nf = NumberFormat::createPercentInstance( success ); delete nf;

Each of these methods has two variants; one with an explicit locale

and one without; the latter using the default locale.

nf = NumberFormat::createInstance( myLocale, success ); delete nf;

nf = NumberFormat::createCurrencyInstance( myLocale, success ); delete nf;

nf = NumberFormat::createPercentInstance( myLocale, success ); delete nf;

Locale

is the mechanism for identifying the kind of object

(

NumberFormat

) that you would like to get. The locale is

<STRONG

>just

</STRONG

> a mechanism for identifying objects,

<STRONG

>not

</STRONG

> a container for the objects themselves.

Each class that performs locale-sensitive operations allows you

to get all the available objects of that type. You can sift

through these objects by language, country, or variant,

and use the display names to present a menu to the user.

For example, you can create a menu of all the collation objects

suitable for a given language. Such classes implement these

three class methods:

static Locale* getAvailableLocales(int32_t

numLocales)

static UnicodeString

getDisplayName(const Locale

objectLocale,

const Locale

displayLocale,

UnicodeString

displayName)

static UnicodeString

getDisplayName(const Locale

objectLocale,

UnicodeString

displayName)

ICU 2.0

Public Methods

const Locale & getRoot ()

Useful constant for the Root locale.

ICU 4.4

const Locale & getEnglish ()

Useful constant for this language.

ICU 2.0

const Locale & getFrench ()

Useful constant for this language.

ICU 2.0

const Locale & getGerman ()

Useful constant for this language.

ICU 2.0

const Locale & getItalian ()

Useful constant for this language.

ICU 2.0

const Locale & getJapanese ()

Useful constant for this language.

ICU 2.0

const Locale & getKorean ()

Useful constant for this language.

ICU 2.0

const Locale & getChinese ()

Useful constant for this language.

ICU 2.0

const Locale & getSimplifiedChinese ()

Useful constant for this language.

ICU 2.0

const Locale & getTraditionalChinese ()

Useful constant for this language.

ICU 2.0

const Locale & getFrance ()