Services in the Internationalization Module that are sensitive to the locale of the user of a program accept an RWULocale to tailor the behavior of the service. For example, an RWULocale instance may be used to take language-specific conventions into account when collating strings using RWUCollator (see Chapter 6):

Because an RWULocale provides nothing more than simple locale identification, no validity checking is performed when you create an RWULocale. To check for valid locale names, use RWUAvailableLocaleList to construct an iterator that provides access to the list of locale names recognized by the Internationalization Module, as described in Listing Available Locales.

Because construction of an RWULocale is cheap, you cannot modify an RWULocale instance once it is created. However, accessor methods are provided. For example, getName() returns the full name of a locale as an RWCString. Similarly, getLanguage(), getCountry(), and getVariant() return the separate language, country, and variant components of a locale.

Methods are also provided for accessing the identifiers of a locale in a form suitable for displaying to an end user in a locale-sensitive manner. For example, getDisplayName() returns the full name of a locale as an RWUString according to the default locale. You can also pass in another locale indicating the locale of the end user. For example, this code returns the full name of a locale according to the Germany locale:

Similarly, getDisplayLanguage(), getDisplayCountry(), and getDisplayVariant() return the separate language, country, and variant components of a locale name according to a given locale.