Unicode Explained

Time and date

Representation of and operations on dates and times in multiple calendars and

time zones

Formatting and parsing

Reading and writing dates, times, numbers, currencies, messages, and rule-based

patterns

Using Locales

Computer technology has mostly been developed in English-speaking environments,

and much of the way in which it handles characters and notations reflects the conven-

tions of English. However, the majority of people speak languages other than English

as their native language. As computers become a popular commodity, it is increasingly

important to let people use them in their own language and according to their cultural

conventions. To big software companies, this is essential, since they aim at a worldwide

market. It is also important to small companies, due to the competitive advantage.

There are many aspects in making computing technology useable to people with dif-

ferent backgrounds, and part of this is the translation of user interfaces to software.

This includes traditional translation work but also new challenges. Increasingly, pro-

grams generate texts dynamically, as immediate responses to user queries and respon-

ses. Of course, such texts cannot be translated on the fly by human translators.

Suppose that you are designing a program that accepts a search string as input from a

user, searches for data in a bibliographic database (i.e., a database containing infor- ...