If someone sets the language to (say) French but keeps their locale as English, do you write a thousand as 1,000 or 1.000? What about the reverse case?
If you were discussing POSIX locale, the definitions are quite clear, and there's no ambiguity. But that's also because POSIX subdivides locale into many subsections.
From "man setlocale":
LC_ALL All of the locale
LC_ADDRESS Formatting of addresses and
geography-related items (*)
LC_COLLATE String collation
LC_CTYPE Character classification
LC_IDENTIFICATION Metadata describing the locale (*)
LC_MEASUREMENT Settings related to measurements
(metric versus US customary) (*)
LC_MESSAGES Localizable natural-language messages
LC_MONETARY Formatting of monetary values
LC_NAME Formatting of salutations for persons (*)
LC_NUMERIC Formatting of nonmonetary numeric values
LC_PAPER Settings related to the standard paper size (*)
LC_TELEPHONE Formats to be used with telephone services (*)
LC_TIME Formatting of date and time values
Not to disparage the conversation the technical bits are certainly interesting but, for almost every application, this is the point where things move towards diminishing returns. You could invest infinitely into getting every bit of design and copy for every language and locale permutation flawless and you’re company would be worse off because you should have spent that time elsewhere. In many cases, it’s simply not unrealistic to expect your customer to use google translate.
I've got GNOME set up in English, but my region to be the Netherlands. It will helpfully display local dates, but that also results in the month names being in Dutch.
Unfortunately I don't really know what LC_TIME is :) But if I look through the calendar widget that drops down when I click the time in the top bar, is says e.g. that the previous month is called "augustus" and that today is "vrijdag". Looking into my "Region & Language" settings, my language is set to English (United Kingdom), and formats is set to Nederland (Nederlands), which is said to cover numbers, dates and currencies. Especially for currencies I'd prefer my local currency, but I'd prefer for numbers to use the UK system, and not quite sure what I'd like for dates as long as it's not the US system.
I checked the documentation for the ICU Unicode library and Apple's Foundation library, and they both say that numerical formatting is a property of the locale rather than the language. I'd be surprised if other major platforms did otherwise.
Yeah my understanding is people would classify this as locale too, but it's always seemed weird to me. I guess my question is whether this is about formatting to begin with. Periods mean something different depending on the language, right? It seems less about displaying it differently and more about conveying correct information. But then again, mm/dd/yy and dd/mm/yy are often exposed as a formatting option...
Ouch. If you are writing user interface for something that doesn't need to be "correct" (legally, or whatever), I find it best to accept whatever decimal separator (what you want, or change by locale, or both, whatever), and never use or allow thousands separators. Bonus points if you document it somewhere on the interface.
If you really, really, really need a thousands separator, use spaces.
This is correct, but if we're being pedantic (it is HN after all) the locale code for the UK is "gb". The language / locale would be fr-gb.
I work on this sort of thing for airline ticketing pages. fr-gb would mean the customer wants the page text to be in French, but they want to buy a ticket using the UK system (i.e. Using GBP instead of EUR as the currency if possible, and all the formatting differences that would be specific to "gb").
Quick edit: technically I guess your locale doesn't have to determine your store region, that's just how we do it. As far as I know there's nothing except development effort preventing us from allowing someone to book a flight in French, using GB locale, and with preference for the Japanese point-of-sale system.
I really appreciate websites that allow me to use "Denmark - English" and see prices and payment options I understand, in the language I understand best.
