The Default Locale

IBM Informix products use U.S. English as the default locale if you do not set the environment variables that can specify a locale.

The default locale specifies the following information:

• The U.S. English language and an English-language code set
• Standard U.S. formats for monetary, numeric, date, and time data

To use the default locale for database applications requires no special steps. To use a customized version of U.S. English, British English, or another language, however, your environment must identify the appropriate locale.

For information on how to specify a GLS locale, see Setting a Nondefault Locale.

The Default Code Set

The default locale, U.S. English, has the following locale name, where en indicates the English language, us indicates the United States territory, and the numbers indicate the platform-specific name of the default code set.

The default code set is the code set that the default locale supports. When you use the default locale, the default code set supports both the ASCII code set and some set of 8-bit characters. For a chart of ASCII values, see the Relational Operator segment in the IBM Informix: Guide to SQL Syntax. The following table describes the default code set for UNIX and for Windows platforms.

In a locale name, you can specify the code set as either the code-set name or the condensed form of the code-set name. For example, the following locale names both identify the U.S. English locale with the ISO8859-1 code set:

• The locale name en_us.8859-1 uses the code-set name to identify the ISO8859-1 code set.
• The locale name en_us.0333 uses the condensed form of the code-set name to identify the ISO8859-1 code set.

For more information on the condensed form of a code-set name, see Code-Set-Conversion Filenames.

Default End-User Formats for Date and Time

In the default locale, IBM Informix products use the following end-user formats for date and time values:

• For DATE values: %m/%d/%iy
• For DATETIME values: %iY-%m-%d %H:%M:%S

For information about these formatting directives, see GL_DATE and GL_DATETIME. For an introduction to date and time end-user formats, see Date and Time Formats. For information about how to customize these end-user formats, see Customizing Date and Time End-User Formats.

Default End-User Formats for Numeric and Monetary Values

When you use the default locale, IBM Informix products use the following end-user formats for numeric and monetary values:

• The thousands separator is the comma (,).
• The decimal separator is the period (.).
• Three digits appear between each thousands separator.
• The positive and negative signs are plus (+) and minus (-), respectively.

For monetary values, IBM Informix products also use a currency symbol, the dollar ($) sign, in front of a monetary value. For an introduction to numeric and monetary end-user formats, see Numeric and Monetary Formats. For information about how to customize these end-user formats, see Customizing Monetary Values.