Internationalization

he 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 in that it provides employees and business partners with immediate access to the information they need in the languages they can understand.

The directory supports all international characters sets by default because directory data is stored in UTF-8. Further, the directory server allows you to specify search matching rules and collation orders based on language preferences.

You must use ASCII characters for attribute and object class names. For information on object classes, attributes, and the directory server schema, see the Netscape Directory Server Deployment Manual. For information on extending your schema, see

Chapter 3, "Extending the Directory Schema."

The 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 simply an internal table that the operating system uses to relate keyboard keys to character font screen displays.

More specifically, a locale specifies the following:

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 it is read (left to right, right to left, or up and down). The directory server uses the collation orders to perform searches on internationalized directory data.

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 | character is considered punctuation while in others it is considered alphabetic.

The numeric format provides information on how users of a specific region or culture expect numeric data to be presented. For example, some cultural- specific notions of numeric format include what character to use as a decimal or what character is used as the thousands separator.

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/date format indicates such things as whether dates are customarily represented in the mm/dd/yy, month day, year, or dd/mm/yy 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 takes into account 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.

The locale information is automatically copied to the <NSHOME>/nls/locales directory during the directory server installation.

Identifying Supported Locales

When performing directory server operations that require you to specify a locale, such as a search operation, you can either 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 uppercase 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, in an object-oriented system such as the directory server. The OIDs you use when searching or indexing an internationalized directory identify specific collation orders supported by the directory server. For example, the OID 2.16.840.1.113730.3.3.2.17.1 identifies the Finnish collation order.

When performing an international search on the directory server data, you can 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.

The following table lists each locale supported by the directory server and identifies the associated language tags and OIDs.

Table D.1 Supported locales


Locale	Language tag	Collation order object identifiers (OIDs)
Albanian	`sq`	`2.16.840.1.113730.3.3.2.44.1`
Arabic	`ar`	`2.16.840.1.113730.3.3.2.1.1`
Byelorussian	`be`	`2.16.840.1.113730.3.3.2.2.1`
Bulgarian	`bg`	`2.16.840.1.113730.3.3.2.3.1`
Catalan	`ca`	`2.16.840.1.113730.3.3.2.4.1`
Chinese (Simplified)	`zh`	`2.16.840.1.113730.3.3.2.49.1`
Chinese (Traditional)	`zh-TW`	`2.16.840.1.113730.3.3.2.50.1`
Croatian	`hr`	`2.16.840.1.113730.3.3.2.22.1`
Czechoslovakian	`cs`	`2.16.840.1.113730.3.3.2.5.1`
Danish	`da`	`2.16.840.1.113730.3.3.2.6.1`
English (US)	`en or en-US`	`2.16.840.1.113730.3.3.2.11.1`
Estonian	`et`	`2.16.840.1.113730.3.3.2.16.1`
Finnish	`fi`	`2.16.840.1.113730.3.3.2.17.1`
French	`fr or fr-FR`	`2.16.840.1.113730.3.3.2.18.1`
German	`de`	`2.16.840.1.113730.3.3.2.7.1`
Greek	`el`	`2.16.840.1.113730.3.3.2.10.1`
Hebrew	`iw`	`2.16.840.1.113730.3.3.2.27.1`
Hungarian	`hu`	`2.16.840.1.113730.3.3.2.23.1`
Icelandic	`is`	`2.16.840.1.113730.3.3.2.24.1`
Japanese	`ja`	`2.16.840.1.113730.3.3.2.28.1`
Korean	`ko`	`2.16.840.1.113730.3.3.2.29.1`
Latvian, Lettish	`lv`	`2.16.840.1.113730.3.3.2.31.1`
Lithuanian	`lt`	`2.16.840.1.113730.3.3.2.30.1`
Macedonian	`mk`	`2.16.840.1.113730.3.3.2.32.1`
Norwegian	`no`	`2.16.840.1.113730.3.3.2.35.1`
Polish	`pl`	`2.16.840.1.113730.3.3.2.38.1`
Romanian	`ro`	`2.16.840.1.113730.3.3.2.39.1`
Russian	`ru`	`2.16.840.1.113730.3.3.2.40.1`
Serbian (Cyrilic)	`sr`	`2.16.840.1.113730.3.3.2.45.1`
Serbian (Latin)	`sh`	`2.16.840.1.113730.3.3.2.41.1`
Slovakian	`sk`	`2.16.840.1.113730.3.3.2.42.1`
Slovenian	`sl`	`2.16.840.1.113730.3.3.2.43.1`
Spanish	`es or es-ES`	`2.16.840.1.113730.3.3.2.15.1`
Swedish	`sv`	`2.16.840.1.113730.3.3.2.46.1`
Turkish	`tr`	`2.16.840.1.113730.3.3.2.47.1`
Ukranian	`uk`	`2.16.840.1.113730.3.3.2.48.1`

For information on how to set up a Netscape client to use non-English character sets, refer to the Netscape Directory Server Installation Guide.