Working with cultures

Internationalization is the process of enabling your code to correctly run all over the world. It has two parts, globalization and localization, and both of them are about working with cultures.

Globalization is about writing your code to accommodate multiple languages and region combinations. The combination of a language and a region is known as a culture. It is important for your code to know both the language and region because, for example, the date and currency formats are different in Quebec and Paris, despite them both using the French language.

There are International Organization for Standardization (ISO) codes for all culture combinations. For example, in the code da-DK, da indicates the Danish language and DK indicates the Denmark region, and in the code fr-CA, fr indicates the French language and CA indicates the Canada region.

ISO is not just an acronym. ISO is a reference to the Greek word isos (which means equal). You can see...