In the Internationalization Module, class RWULocale represents a locale. Services in the Internationalization Module that are sensitive to the locale of the user accept an RWULocale to tailor the behavior of the service.

RWULocale does not directly map to RWLocale in the Essential Tools Module of SourcePro Core, the POSIX locale, or std::locale. As described in Named Locales, RWULocale clearly defines the language, country, and variant codes, unlike the less clearly specified names allowed by these other representations. RWULocale does not directly provide formatting services, as in the SourcePro and Standard C++ locale classes. Instead, RWULocale is used to index into the rich set of services provided by the Internationalization Module. For example, an RWULocale instance may be used to retrieve locale-dependent data from an RWUResourceBundle (see Localized Resources ), or to take language-specific conventions into account when collating strings using RWUCollator (see Chapter 6).