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=head1 NAME
perl18n - Perl i18n (internalization)
=head1 DESCRIPTION
Perl supports the language-specific notions of data like
"is this a letter" and "which letter comes first". These
are very important issues especially for languages other
than English -- but also for English: it would be very
naïve indeed to think that C<A-Za-z> defines all the letters.
Perl understands the language-specific data via the standardized
(ISO C, XPG4, POSIX 1.c) method called "the locale system".
The locale system is controlled per application using one
function call and several environment variables.
=head1 USING LOCALES
If your operating system supports the locale system and you have
installed the locale system and you have set your locale environment
variables correctly (please see below) before running Perl, Perl will
understand your data correctly according to your locale settings.
In runtime you can switch locales using the POSIX::setlocale().
# setlocale is the function call
# LC_CTYPE will be explained later
use POSIX qw(setlocale LC_CTYPE);
# query and save the old locale.
$old_locale = setlocale(LC_CTYPE);
setlocale(LC_CTYPE, "fr_CA.ISO8859-1");
# for LC_CTYPE now in locale "French, Canada, codeset ISO 8859-1"
setlocale(LC_CTYPE, "");
# for LC_CTYPE now in locale what the LC_ALL / LC_CTYPE / LANG define.
# see below for documentation about the LC_ALL / LC_CTYPE / LANG.
# restore the old locale
setlocale(LC_CTYPE, $old_locale);
The first argument of C<setlocale()> is called B<the category> and the
second argument B<the locale>. The category tells in what aspect of data
processing we want to apply language-specific rules, the locale tells
in what language-country/territory-codeset - but read on for the naming
of the locales: not all systems name locales as in the example.
For further information about the categories, please consult your
L<setlocale(3)> manual. For the locales available in your system, also
consult the L<setlocale(3)> manual and see whether it leads you to the
list of the available locales (search for the C<SEE ALSO> section). If
that fails, try out in command line the following commands:
=over 12
=item locale -a
=item nlsinfo
=item ls /usr/lib/nls/loc
=item ls /usr/lib/locale
=item ls /usr/lib/nls
=back
and see whether they list something resembling these
en_US.ISO8859-1 de_DE.ISO8859-1 ru_RU.ISO8859-5
en_US de_DE ru_RU
en de ru
english german russian
english.iso88591 german.iso88591 russian.iso88595
Sadly enough even if the calling interface has been standardized
the names of the locales are not. The naming usually is
language-country/territory-codeset but the latter parts may
not be present. Two special locales are worth special mention:
"C"
and
"POSIX"
Currently and effectively these are the same locale: the difference is
mainly that the first one is defined by the C standard and the second
one is defined by the POSIX standard. What they mean and define is the
B<default locale> in which every program does start in. The language
is (American) English and the character codeset C<ASCII>.
B<NOTE>: not all systems have the C<"POSIX"> locale (not all systems
are POSIX): use the C<"C"> locale when you need the default locale.
=head2 Category LC_CTYPE: CHARACTER TYPES
Starting from Perl version 5.002 perl has obeyed the C<LC_CTYPE>
environment variable which controls application's notions on
which characters are alphabetic characters. This affects in
Perl the regular expression metanotation
\w
which stands for alphanumeric characters, that is, alphabetic and
numeric characters (please consult L<perlre> for more information
about regular expressions). Thanks to the C<LC_CTYPE>, depending on
your locale settings, characters like C<Æ>, C<É>, C<ß>, C<ø>, can be
understood as C<\w> characters.
=head2 Category LC_COLLATE: COLLATION
Starting from Perl version 5.003_06 perl has obeyed the B<LC_COLLATE>
environment variable which controls application's notions on the
collation (ordering) of the characters. C<B> does in most Latin
alphabets follow the C<A> but where do the C<Á> and C<Ä> belong?
Here is a code snippet that will tell you what are the alphanumeric
characters in the current locale, in the locale order:
perl -le 'print sort grep /\w/, map { chr() } 0..255'
As noted above, this will work only for Perl versions 5.003_06 and up.
B<NOTE>: in the pre-5.003_06 Perl releases the per-locale collation
was possible using the C<I18N::Collate> library module. This is now
mildly obsolete and to be avoided. The C<LC_COLLATE> functionality is
integrated into the Perl core language and one can use scalar data
completely normally -- there is no need to juggle with the scalar
references of C<I18N::Collate>.
=head1 ENVIRONMENT
=over 12
=item PERL_BADLANG
A string that controls whether Perl warns in its startup about failed
locale settings. This can happen if the locale support in the
operating system is lacking (broken) is some way. If this string has
an integer value differing from zero, Perl will not complain.
B<NOTE>: this is just hiding the warning message: the message tells
about some problem in your system's locale support and you should
investigate what the problem is.
=back
The following environment variables are not specific to Perl: they are
part of the standardized (ISO C, XPG4, POSIX 1.c) setlocale method to
control an application's opinion on data.
=over 12
=item LC_ALL
C<LC_ALL> is the "override-all" locale environment variable. If it is
set, it overrides all the rest of the locale environment variables.
=item LC_CTYPE
C<LC_ALL> controls the classification of characters, see above.
If this is unset and the C<LC_ALL> is set, the C<LC_ALL> is used as
the C<LC_CTYPE>. If both this and the C<LC_ALL> are unset but the C<LANG>
is set, the C<LANG> is used as the C<LC_CTYPE>.
If none of these three is set, the default locale C<"C">
is used as the C<LC_CTYPE>.
=item LC_COLLATE
C<LC_ALL> controls the collation of characters, see above.
If this is unset and the C<LC_ALL> is set, the C<LC_ALL> is used as
the C<LC_CTYPE>. If both this and the C<LC_ALL> are unset but the
C<LANG> is set, the C<LANG> is used as the C<LC_COLLATE>.
If none of these three is set, the default locale C<"C">
is used as the C<LC_COLLATE>.
=item LANG
LC_ALL is the "catch-all" locale environment variable. If it is set,
it is used as the last resort if neither of the C<LC_ALL> and the
category-specific C<LC_...> are set.
=back
There are further locale-controlling environment variables
(C<LC_MESSAGES, LC_MONETARY, LC_NUMERIC, LC_TIME>) but Perl
B<does not> currently obey them.
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