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Administrator's Guide Netscape Directory Server |
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Appendix D Internationalization
Netscape Directory Server (Directory Server) allows you to store, manage, and search for entries and their associated attributes in a number of different languages. An internationalized directory can be an invaluable corporate resource, providing employees and business partners with immediate access to the information they need in the languages they can understand.
The directory supports all international characters set by default because directory data is stored in UTF-8. Further, Directory Server allows you to specify matching rules and collation orders based on language preferences in search operations.
You must use ASCII characters for attribute and object class names.
This appendix contains the following sections:
Directory Server provides support for multiple languages through the use of locales. A locale identifies language-specific information about how users of a specific region, culture, and/or custom expect data to be presented, including how data of a given language is interpreted and how data is to be sorted, or collated.
In addition, the locale information indicates what code page should be used to represent a given language. A code page is an internal table that the operating system uses to relate keyboard keys to character font screen displays.
More specifically, a locale specifies:
- Collation order—The collation order provides language and cultural-specific information about how the characters of a given language are to be sorted. It identifies things like the sequence of the letters in the alphabet, how to compare letters with accents with letters without accents, and if there are any characters that can be ignored when comparing strings. The collation order also takes into account culture-specific information about a language, such as the direction in which the language is read (left to right, right to left, or up and down).
- Character type —The character type distinguishes alphabetic characters from numeric or other characters. In addition, it defines the mapping of upper-case to lower-case letters. For example, in some languages, the pipe (|) character is considered punctuation while in others it is considered alphabetic.
- Monetary format—The monetary format specifies the monetary symbol used by a specific region, whether the symbol goes before or after its value, and how monetary units are represented.
- Time/date format—The time and date format indicates the customary formatting for times and dates in the region. The time and date format indicates whether dates are customarily represented in the
mm/dd/yy(month, day, year), ordd/mm/yy(day, month, year) format and specifies what the days of the week and month are in a given language. For example, the date January 10, 1996 is represented as 10.leden 1996 in Czechoslovakian and 10 janvier 1996 in French.Because a locale describes cultural, customary, and regional differences in addition to mechanical language differences, the directory data can both be translated into the specific languages understood by your users as well as be presented in a way that users in a given region expect.
Locale information is automatically copied to the serverRoot
/lib/nls/locale30directory during Directory Server installation.
When performing directory operations that require you to specify a locale, such as a search operation, you can use a language tag or a collation order object identifier (OID).
A language tag is a string that begins with the two-character lowercase language code that identifies the language (as defined in ISO standard 639). If necessary to distinguish regional differences in language, the language tag may also contain a country code, which is a two-character string (as defined in ISO standard 3166). The language code and country code are separated by a hyphen. For example, the language tag used to identify the British English locale is en-GB.
An object identifier (OID) is a decimal number used to uniquely identify an object, such as an attribute or object class. The OIDs you use when searching or indexing an internationalized directory identify specific collation orders supported by the Directory Server. For example, the OID
2.16.840.1.113730.3.3.2.17.1identifies the Finnish collation order.When performing an international search in the directory, use either the language tag or the OID to identify the collation order you want to use. However, when setting up an international index, you must use the OIDs. for more information on indexing, see Chapter 10 "Managing Indexes."
Table D-1 lists each locale supported by Directory Server and identifies the associated language tags and OIDs.
Language subtypes can be used by clients to determine specific values for which to search. For more information on using language subtypes, see "Adding an Attribute Subtype".
Table D-2 contains the list of supported language subtypes.
Table D-2 Supported Language Subtypes
© 2001 Sun Microsystems, Inc. Portions copyright 1999, 2002 Netscape Communications Corporation. All rights reserved.
Last Updated August 15, 2002