Because the i5/OS™ PASE run time is based on the AIX® run time, i5/OS PASE programs can use the same rich set of programming interfaces for locales, character string manipulation, date and time services, message catalogs, and character encoding conversions supported on AIX.
i5/OS PASE supports the interfaces in AIX run time for managing the locale that an application uses and for performing locale-sensitive functions (such as ctype and strcoll), including support for both single-byte and multibyte character encoding.
i5/OS PASE includes a subset of AIX locales, which provide support for a large number of countries and languages using industry-standard encoding (code sets ISO8859-x), code set IBM-1250, and code set UTF-8. i5/OS PASE provides support for the Euro in three different ways: IBM-1252 locales and ISO 8859-15 locales (both of which use single-byte encodings), and UTF-8 locales.
i5/OS PASE does not ship a utility to create new locales. However, you can create locales for use in i5/OS PASE on an AIX system with the localedef utility.
When an i5/OS PASE application changes locales, generally it also should change the i5/OS PASE CCSID (using the _SETCCSID runtime function) to match the encoding for the new locale. This ensures that any character data interface arguments are correctly interpreted by i5/OS PASE run time (and possibly converted when calling an EBCDIC system service). You can use the cstoccsid runtime function to determine what CCSID corresponds to a code set name.
The i5/OS PASE run time sets the CCSID tag on any file created by an i5/OS PASE program to the current i5/OS PASE CCSID value (supplied either when the program is started or using the most recent _SETCCSID value).
You should use UTF-8 locales for i5/OS PASE applications that support Japanese, Korean, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified Chinese. i5/OS includes other locales for these languages, but the system does not support setting the i5/OS PASE CCSID to match the encoding for IBM-eucXX code sets. Using UTF-8 support might require converting file data that might be stored in other encoding (such as Shift-JIS) when the application runs on other platforms.
Conversion objects and locales for i5/OS PASE are packaged with i5/OS language feature codes. When you install i5/OS PASE, only those locales that are associated with installed i5/OS language features are created.
All i5/OS PASE locales use ASCII or UTF-8 character encoding; therefore, all i5/OS PASE run time works in ASCII (or UTF-8).