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
strcoll
and strxfrm
); see section Collation Functions.
LC_CTYPE
LC_MONETARY
LC_NUMERIC
LC_TIME
LC_MESSAGES
LC_ALL
setlocale
to set a single locale for all purposes. Setting
this environment variable overwrites all selections by the other
LC_*
variables or LANG
.
LANG
When developing the message translation functions it was felt that the
functionality provided by the variables above is not sufficient. E.g., it
should be possible to specify more than one locale name. For an example
take a Swedish user who better speaks German than English, the programs
messages by default are written in English. Then it should be possible
to specify that the first choice for the language is Swedish, the second
choice is German, and if this also fails English is used. This is
possible with the variable LANGUAGE
. For further description of
this GNU extension see section User influence on gettext
.
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