Why <U0025> instead of % in locales?

[Petter Reinholdtsen]

Why do the locales contain unicode character representation for ASCII
characters?  This make the locale hard to read and even harder to
write.  The format strings would be a lot easier to correct if normal
ASCII characters was used.

Some locaes use ASCII where others use the <U0000> notation (check for
example country_ab2).

Is it OK for me to convert the Norwegian Bokmål locale to use ASCII in
the date format strings (these are horribly broken, and it will be
easier for me to edit them in ASCII)?