Locale Guide

Guide to specifying a locale.

The locale Parameter

The locales supported by Java are listed on the Supported Locales page linked from the JavaSoft web site.

The locale is made up of a code for the language and a code for the country. The language code is a valid ISO Language Code. These codes are the lower-case two-letter codes as defined by ISO-639. You can find a full list of these codes at a number of sites, such as: ISO-639 page. The country code is a valid ISO Country Code. These codes are the upper-case two-letter codes as defined by ISO-3166. You can find a full list of these codes at a number of sites, such as: ISO-3166 page.

The locale specification will be used to determine the encoding of the input and output files according to the following table.

Locale Encoding
en_US ISO-8859-1
ja_JP Shift_JIS
ko_KR CP949

A complete list of Java supported encoding can be found on the Supported Encoding page linked from the JavaSoft web site.

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by Bill Rich