NLS in a Web archtecture

Question

I'm building a Web application that will have to support the Western European character set to accomodate French, Italian, Spanish, and German.
How/where do I set the client NLS vars to display the proper locale settings?
Clients from all countries will be coming through the Web site so what's the best way to determine what language that client is wanting to use/view?
I was hoping I could set the nls values at the listener level and have a different service for each language, but I don't think this is possible.
I'm looking for suggestions. I know I'm not breaking new ground here. Just not seeing the entire solution.
Thank you,
Todd Holtmann
[email protected]

Answer 1

We can separate this issues into 2 areas.
1. encoding
2. locale
To support the mentioned languages, ISO-8859-1 or ISO-8859-15 are good choices (the latter one with EURO symbol).
For locale support, for every db connection, we should issue "ALTER SESSION". For example, in a "Spanish" session,
ALTER SESSSION SET NLS_LANGUAGE = SPANISH;
ALTER SESSION SET NLS_TERRITORY = SPAIN;
SELECT * FROM EMP ORDER BY ENAME;
In general, it alters the behavior of collation(sorting), date, number and currency format.
Hope this helps.