Certain locale-dependent capabilities were added as new standard functions. Besides setlocale(), which allows control over the locale itself, the standard includes the following new functions:
Numeric/monetary conventions
Collation order of two strings
Translate string for collation
Format date and time
In addition, there are the multibyte functions mblen(), mbtowc(), mbstowcs(), wctomb(), and wcstombs().
The localeconv() function returns a pointer to a structure containing information useful for formatting numeric and monetary information appropriate to the current locale’s LC_NUMERIC and LC_MONETARY categories. This is the only function whose behavior depends on more than one category. For numeric values, the structure describes the decimal-point character, the thousands separator, and where the separators should be located. Fifteen other structure members describe how to format a monetary value.
The strcoll() function is analogous to the strcmp() function except that the two strings are compared according to the LC_COLLATE category of the current locale. The strxfrm() function can also be used to transform a string into another, such that any two such after-translation strings can be passed to strcmp() and result in an ordering analogous to what strcoll() would have returned if passed the two pre-translation strings.
The strftime() function provides formatting similar to that used with sprintf() of the values in a struct tm, along with some date and time representations that depend on the LC_TIME category of the current locale. This function is based on the ascftime() function released as part of UNIX System V Release 3.2 .