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Do region and language selections in the Windows OS actually have a set of characters associated to them?

When you use the CultureAndRegionalInfoBuilder class to register a new culture to the system, the only characters associated to your new culture that you can set are the native digits. I need to register an obscure language that uses UTF-8 characters that don't exist in the languages that come packaged with Windows or in any of the language packs. I'm uncertain about the internals of Windows culture definitions and whether or not a character set is stored with them. My assumption is that the culture definition does nothing more than let you specify the native digits and various formats used in that culture and give applications a mechanism for localization and formatting and that it really has nothing to do with a specified character set. Can someone tell me if my assumption here is correct.

Ryan
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Your assumption is correct; the custom culture created by CultureAndRegionalInfoBuilder does not define a set of characters used by the language.

Out of curiosity, what language do you want to support?

Eric MSFT
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  • Thanks for the feedback Eric. We are up to about 32 languages that aren't installed with Windows. Here are a few that we are working with: Cebuano, Guarani, Fante, Efik, Bislama, Chuukese, Gilbertese... The long story short is that we support a translation system that blows up if we get an XML file that calls for a culture that isn't installed to the OS. That's where this whole thing started. :) – Ryan Jun 06 '14 at 17:52