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<concept id="GUID-457CC544-EC3B-4863-A5C4-DC7046614929" xml:lang="en"><title>Locale-sensitive

data types</title><prolog><metadata><keywords/></metadata></prolog><conbody>

<p>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.</p>

<p>The Symbian platform maintains locale-based data type information internally.</p>

<p>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:</p>

<ul>

<li><p><xref href="GUID-53299759-C2DD-3ABC-A055-9AFE7C5081C6.dita"><apiname>TLocale</apiname></xref> allows access to the locale settings</p>

</li>

<li><p><xref href="GUID-A2D3BA72-9B27-3BFF-950A-D7E3B2004821.dita"><apiname>TTime</apiname></xref> provides date and time methods</p>

</li>

<li><p><xref href="GUID-28F1EA9D-9F02-3E8C-A07F-4D65C955860C.dita"><apiname>TRealFormat</apiname></xref> allows access to the locale

settings relevant to real number types</p></li>

</ul>

<p>Use these classes in your code when you need to format the relevant

data types.</p>

<p>For information on converting character set encodings, see <xref href="GUID-F3406651-0B57-50FD-81CA-A3D4000D5625.dita">Character

Conversion (CHARCONV)</xref>.</p>

<p/>