Locale-sensitive data types

Mobile device users can often select presentation styles for data types that vary between different countries and regions based on preferred conventions grouped according to locale. Locale is a concept that attempts to identify cultural conventions (including a language) like number, date and time formatting, currencies, sorting, and so on. Locale can also contain country-specific conventions, such as time zones. To clarify the idea of locale, consider for instance English. The English variant for United Kingdom requires different settings than the variant for the US market. For example, they have different date formats, different first day of the week, different currency symbol, different time zone, different international country dialing code, and so on. All these settings come from locale, which should be called by applications.

The Symbian platform maintains locale-based data type information internally.

Examples of the classes that the Symbian platform provides for correctly formatting data types for the current locale of the mobile device include the following items:

• TLocale allows access to the locale settings

• TTime provides date and time methods

• TRealFormat allows access to the locale settings relevant to real number types

Use these classes in your code when you need to format the relevant data types.

For information on converting character set encodings, see Character Conversion (CHARCONV) .