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 S60 platform maintains locale-based data type information internally.
For more information on locale, see Locale.
Examples of the classes that the S60 platform provides for correctly formatting data types for the current locale of the mobile device include the following items in the Symbian OS Library:
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 Using Character Conversion (CHARCONV) in the Symbian OS Librarty.