Locale categories

Locale category source definitions:

The category source definition consists of:

• The category header (category name), where the category name must be all uppercase characters.
• The associated keyword/value pairs that comprise the category body. Keywords can be all uppercase, all lowercase, or mixed case characters.
• The category trailer (which consists of END category-name)

For example:

LC_CTYPE
source for LC_CTYPE category
END LC_CTYPE

Lines preceding the first category header can be used to change the comment character and the escape character. The comment_char (the default is #) and escape_char (the default is \) keywords can be used to change these characters. The following example shows how to change the comment character and escape character to * and / :

comment_char <asterisk>
escape_char  <slash>

The source for all categories is specified using the following:

Keywords

Each keyword identifies either a definition or a rule. The remainder of the statement containing the keyword contains the operands to the keyword. Operands are separated from the keyword by one or more blank characters. A statement may be continued on the next line by placing an escape_char as the last character before the newline or linefeed character that ends the line.

Lines containing the comment_char in the first column are treated as comment lines. Comment lines cannot be continued on a subsequent line using an escape character. \ is the default escape character. However, the escape character can be defined to be any character by the user.

Strings

Strings must be enclosed in quotation marks. Quotation marks within strings can be represented in two ways:

• Literally. The escape character can be followed by quotation marks.
• A symbolic name. For example, <quotation-mark>.

A string can be continued on the next line by placing an escape_char as the last character before the newline or linefeed character that ends the line.

A string is a sequence of character symbols or literals enclosed by quotation ("") characters. For example:

"<A><B><C>"

Character literals

A character literal is the character itself.

Character symbols

A character symbol begins with the < (less-than) character, followed by non-control characters, and ends with the > (greater-than) character. For example, <A> is a valid character symbol (symbolic name). Any character symbol referenced in the source file should be one of the predefined system-supplied symbols. The system-supplied symbolic names are in the source file member QLGSYMBOL in the QLOCALESRC source file in the optionally installable library QSYSLOCALE.

In the event that the system does not contain a predefined symbolic name for a character, the UCS-2 level-1 format is allowed. The UCS-2 format is based on the character set defined in ISO/IEC 10646. The UCS-2 format may also be used in place of the predefined symbolic names. Here is an example of the UCS-2 symbolic name format:

<Uxxxx>

where 'xxxx' are 4 hexadecimal digits. For example, <U0041>. The hexadecimal number 0041 within this symbolic name is the UCS-2 code point that represents the character 'A'.

Each locale category must be explicitly defined in a locale definition source file.