This Clause describes components that C++ programs may use to encapsulate (and therefore be more portable when confronting) cultural differences. The locale facility includes internationalization support for character classification and string collation, numeric, monetary, and date/time formatting and parsing, and message retrieval.
The following subclauses describe components for locales themselves, the standard facets, and facilities from the ISO C library, as summarized in Table 68.
| Subclause | Header(s) | |
| [locales] | Locales | <locale> |
| [locale.categories] | Standard locale Categories | |
| [c.locales] | C library locales | <clocale> |