Administration Guide

Deriving Locales in Application Programs

Locales are specific to UNIX-based operating systems. There are two locales:

• The environment locale allows you to specify the language, currency symbol, and so on, that you want to use.

• The program locale contains the current language, currency symbol, and so on, of a program that is executing.

When your program is started, it gets a default C locale. It does not get a copy of the environment locale. Your program has a few choices:

• Ignore the environment locale. Your program could hard code some options. For example, your program could set the language to spanish with the setlocale() function.

• Copy the environment locale to the program locale.

• Ignore the environment locale. Use whatever defaults you get from the operating system.

How DB2 Derives Locales

With UNIX, the active locale used by DB2 is determined from the LC_CTYPE portion of the locale. For details, see the NLS documentation for your operating system.

• If LC_CTYPE of the program locale has a value other than that of 'C', DB2 will use this value to determine the application code page by mapping it to its corresponding code page.

• If LC_CTYPE has the value of 'C' (the 'C' locale), DB2 will set the program locale according to the environment locale using the setlocale() function.

• If LC_CTYPE still has a value of 'C', DB2 will use its default locale for that platform. For information on the default locale for a particular platform, see Table 133. Additional information may be found in:

  • Building Applications for Windows and OS/2 Environments

  • Building Applications for UNIX Environments

• If LC_CTYPE's value is no longer 'C', its new value will be used to map to a corresponding code page.

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