6.2 Country Information

Programs use country information to prepare the characters and formats for date, time, currency, and other displayed information. Country information includes the following:

Time, date, and currency formats

Lowercase-to-uppercase character-conversion tables

Collating sequence for character sorting

Valid single-byte characters for use in filenames

All country information is stored in the COUNTRY.SYS file. Default values are set by the system if a country command is not included in the CONFIG.SYS file. A program can retrieve information for any nondefault countries or code pages; however, this information may not be available if the Nlsfunc program has not been loaded. If the country command does not specify the path to the COUNTRY.SYS file, the path must be given as an argument when Nlsfunc is started. Retrieving country information does not change the system's current country code.