Oracle PL/SQL Programming, 5th Edition

Globalization Development Kit for PL/SQL

Starting with Oracle Database 10g, Oracle provides a Globalization Development Kit (GDK) for Java and PL/SQL that simplifies the g11n development process. If you are developing a multilingual application, determining the locale of each user and presenting locale-specific feedback may be the most difficult programming task you will face. The PL/SQL components of the GDK help with this aspect of g11n development, and are delivered in two packages: UTL_I18N and UTL_LMS.

UTL_I18N Utility Package

The UTL_I18N package is the workhorse of the GDK. Its subprograms are summarized in Table 25-7.

Table 25-7. Programs in the UTL_I18N package

Name	Description
ESCAPE_REFERENCE	HTML and XML documents do not always support the same characters that are in the database. In such cases, it would be helpful to return an escape character. This function takes as input the source string, and the character set of the HTML or XML document.
GET_COMMON_TIME_ZONES	Returns a list of the most common time zones. This is particularly useful when presenting a user with a list of time zones he can select from to configure user settings.
GET_DEFAULT_CHARSET	Returns the default character set name or the email-safe name based on the language supplied to this function.
GET_DEFAULT_ISO_CURRENCY	Supplied with a territory, this function returns the appropriate currency code.
GET_DEFAULT_LINGUISTIC_SORT	Returns the most common sort for the supplied language.
GET_LOCAL_LANGUAGES	Returns local languages ...