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(libc.info)Locale Categories

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Categories of Activities that Locales Affect
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   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 Note: Collation Functions.

`LC_CTYPE'
     This category applies to classification and conversion of
     characters, and to multibyte and wide characters; see Note:
     Character Handling, and Note: Character Set Handling.

`LC_MONETARY'
     This category applies to formatting monetary values; see Note:
     General Numeric.

`LC_NUMERIC'
     This category applies to formatting numeric values that are not
     monetary; see Note: General Numeric.

`LC_TIME'
     This category applies to formatting date and time values; see
     Note: Formatting Calendar Time.

`LC_MESSAGES'
     This category applies to selecting the language used in the user
     interface for message translation (Note: The Uniforum approach;
     Note: Message catalogs a la X/Open)  and contains regular
     expressions for affirmative and negative responses.

`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.
     Setting this environment variable overwrites all selections by the
     other `LC_*' variables or `LANG'.

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

   When developing the message translation functions it was felt that
the functionality provided by the variables above is not sufficient.
For example, it should be possible to specify more than one locale name.
Take a Swedish user who better speaks German than English, and a program
whose messages are output in English by default.  It should be possible
to specify that the first choice of language is Swedish, the second
German, and if this also fails to use English.  This is possible with
the variable `LANGUAGE'.  For further description of this GNU extension
see Note: Using gettextized software.


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