What is the difference between the en_US.UTF-8 and ja_JP.UTF-8 locales in the Solaris OS?
The two locales are one of the many UTF-8 locales that share many underlying frameworks and definitions, i.e., locale methods, output methods, input methods and so on and even LC_CTYPE locale definition are the same. Also, most notably, both share the same file and process/wchar_t code representations, and so text data are completely interchangeable between the two locales without any need of code conversions. All other locale definitions are however different, for instance, they both have different LC_COLLATE, LC_MONETARY, LC_NUMERIC etc. definitions. The ja_JP.UTF-8 also has different and additional font charsets supported since Japanese users need more JIS X font charsets such as JIS X 0212. The ja_JP.UTF-8 locale provides fully translated Japanese messages in GUI, CUI, man pages and so on (well, on most of them). The ja_JP.UTF-8 locale also provides its own libraries and utilities that Japanese customers are expecting to have in their locale environment.
