Locale and Locale Sensitivity

Various data types (date and time, any numeric values, strings) can be displayed, parsed, or formatted in different ways according to the Locale property.

Strings can also be influenced by Locale sensitivity.

Locale

Locale 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 as the number should be formatted according to the customs/conventions of the native country, region, or culture of the user.

Each locale code consists of the language code and country arguments.

The language argument is a valid ISO Language Code. These codes are the lower-case, two-letter codes as defined by ISO-639.

The country argument is a valid ISO Country Code. These codes are the upper-case, two-letter codes as defined by ISO-3166.

Instead of specifying the format parameter (or together with it), you can specify the locale parameter.

• In strings, instead of setting a format for the whole date field, specify e.g. the German locale. Data Shaper will then automatically choose the proper date format used in Germany. If the locale is not specified at all, Data Shaper will choose the default one which is given by your system. In order to learn how to change the default locale, refer to Engine Configuration.

• In numbers, on the other hand, there are cases when both the format and locale parameters are meaningful. In the case of specifying the format of decimal numbers, you define the format/pattern with a decimal separator and the locale determines whether the separator is a comma or a dot. If neither the locale or format is specified, the number is converted to string using a universal technique (without checking defaultProperties). If only the format parameter is given, the default locale is used.

See also Class Locale for details about locale in Java.

Example 7. Examples of Locale

en.US or en.GB

For more examples of formatting affected by changing the locale, see above.

Dates, too, can have different formats in different locales (even with different countries of the same language). For instance, March 2, 2009 (in the USA) vs. 2 March 2009 (in the UK).

List of all Locale

A complete list of the locales supported by Data Shaper can be found in a separate table below. The locale format as described above is always "language.COUNTRY".

Locale Sensitivity

Locale sensitivity can be applied to the string data type only. What is more, the Locale has to be specified either for the field or the whole record.

Field settings override the Locale sensitivity specified for the whole record.

Values of Locale sensitivity are the following:

• base_letter_sensitivity
  Does not distinguish different cases of letters nor letters with diacritic marks.

• accent_sensitivity
  Does not distinguish different cases of letters. It distinguishes letters with diacritic marks.

• case_sensitivity
  Distinguishes different cases of letters and letters with diacritic marks. It does not distinguish the letter encoding ("\u00C0" equals to "A\u0300").

• identical_sensitivity
  Distinguishes the letter encoding ("\u00C0" equals to "A\u0300").