Provided by: perl-doc_5.30.0-9ubuntu0.5_all bug

NAME

       perllocale - Perl locale handling (internationalization and localization)

DESCRIPTION

       In the beginning there was ASCII, the "American Standard Code for Information
       Interchange", which works quite well for Americans with their English alphabet and dollar-
       denominated currency.  But it doesn't work so well even for other English speakers, who
       may use different currencies, such as the pound sterling (as the symbol for that currency
       is not in ASCII); and it's hopelessly inadequate for many of the thousands of the world's
       other languages.

       To address these deficiencies, the concept of locales was invented (formally the ISO C,
       XPG4, POSIX 1.c "locale system").  And applications were and are being written that use
       the locale mechanism.  The process of making such an application take account of its
       users' preferences in these kinds of matters is called internationalization (often
       abbreviated as i18n); telling such an application about a particular set of preferences is
       known as localization (l10n).

       Perl has been extended to support certain types of locales available in the locale system.
       This is controlled per application by using one pragma, one function call, and several
       environment variables.

       Perl supports single-byte locales that are supersets of ASCII, such as the ISO 8859 ones,
       and one multi-byte-type locale, UTF-8 ones, described in the next paragraph.  Perl doesn't
       support any other multi-byte locales, such as the ones for East Asian languages.

       Unfortunately, there are quite a few deficiencies with the design (and often, the
       implementations) of locales.  Unicode was invented (see perlunitut for an introduction to
       that) in part to address these design deficiencies, and nowadays, there is a series of
       "UTF-8 locales", based on Unicode.  These are locales whose character set is Unicode,
       encoded in UTF-8.  Starting in v5.20, Perl fully supports UTF-8 locales, except for
       sorting and string comparisons like "lt" and "ge".  Starting in v5.26, Perl can handle
       these reasonably as well, depending on the platform's implementation.  However, for
       earlier releases or for better control, use Unicode::Collate.  There are actually two
       slightly different types of UTF-8 locales: one for Turkic languages and one for everything
       else.  Starting in Perl v5.30, Perl seamlessly handles both types; previously only the
       non-Turkic one was supported.

       Perl continues to support the old non UTF-8 locales as well.  There are currently no UTF-8
       locales for EBCDIC platforms.

       (Unicode is also creating "CLDR", the "Common Locale Data Repository",
       <http://cldr.unicode.org/> which includes more types of information than are available in
       the POSIX locale system.  At the time of this writing, there was no CPAN module that
       provides access to this XML-encoded data.  However, it is possible to compute the POSIX
       locale data from them, and earlier CLDR versions had these already extracted for you as
       UTF-8 locales <http://unicode.org/Public/cldr/2.0.1/>.)

WHAT IS A LOCALE

       A locale is a set of data that describes various aspects of how various communities in the
       world categorize their world.  These categories are broken down into the following types
       (some of which include a brief note here):

       Category "LC_NUMERIC": Numeric formatting
           This indicates how numbers should be formatted for human readability, for example the
           character used as the decimal point.

       Category "LC_MONETARY": Formatting of monetary amounts

       Category "LC_TIME": Date/Time formatting

       Category "LC_MESSAGES": Error and other messages
           This is used by Perl itself only for accessing operating system error messages via $!
           and $^E.

       Category "LC_COLLATE": Collation
           This indicates the ordering of letters for comparison and sorting.  In Latin
           alphabets, for example, "b", generally follows "a".

       Category "LC_CTYPE": Character Types
           This indicates, for example if a character is an uppercase letter.

       Other categories
           Some platforms have other categories, dealing with such things as measurement units
           and paper sizes.  None of these are used directly by Perl, but outside operations that
           Perl interacts with may use these.  See "Not within the scope of "use locale"" below.

       More details on the categories used by Perl are given below in "LOCALE CATEGORIES".

       Together, these categories go a long way towards being able to customize a single program
       to run in many different locations.  But there are deficiencies, so keep reading.

PREPARING TO USE LOCALES

       Perl itself (outside the POSIX module) will not use locales unless specifically requested
       to (but again note that Perl may interact with code that does use them).  Even if there is
       such a request, all of the following must be true for it to work properly:

       •   Your operating system must support the locale system.  If it does, you should find
           that the "setlocale()" function is a documented part of its C library.

       •   Definitions for locales that you use must be installed.  You, or your system
           administrator, must make sure that this is the case. The available locales, the
           location in which they are kept, and the manner in which they are installed all vary
           from system to system.  Some systems provide only a few, hard-wired locales and do not
           allow more to be added.  Others allow you to add "canned" locales provided by the
           system supplier.  Still others allow you or the system administrator to define and add
           arbitrary locales.  (You may have to ask your supplier to provide canned locales that
           are not delivered with your operating system.)  Read your system documentation for
           further illumination.

       •   Perl must believe that the locale system is supported.  If it does, "perl
           -V:d_setlocale" will say that the value for "d_setlocale" is "define".

       If you want a Perl application to process and present your data according to a particular
       locale, the application code should include the "use locale" pragma (see "The "use locale"
       pragma") where appropriate, and at least one of the following must be true:

       1.  The locale-determining environment variables (see "ENVIRONMENT") must be correctly set
           up at the time the application is started, either by yourself or by whomever set up
           your system account; or

       2.  The application must set its own locale using the method described in "The setlocale
           function".

USING LOCALES

   The "use locale" pragma
       Starting in Perl 5.28, this pragma may be used in multi-threaded applications on systems
       that have thread-safe locale ability.  Some caveats apply, see "Multi-threaded" below.  On
       systems without this capability, or in earlier Perls, do NOT use this pragma in scripts
       that have multiple threads active.  The locale in these cases is not local to a single
       thread.  Another thread may change the locale at any time, which could cause at a minimum
       that a given thread is operating in a locale it isn't expecting to be in.  On some
       platforms, segfaults can also occur.  The locale change need not be explicit; some
       operations cause perl to change the locale itself.  You are vulnerable simply by having
       done a "use locale".

       By default, Perl itself (outside the POSIX module) ignores the current locale.  The
       "use locale" pragma tells Perl to use the current locale for some operations.  Starting in
       v5.16, there are optional parameters to this pragma, described below, which restrict which
       operations are affected by it.

       The current locale is set at execution time by setlocale() described below.  If that
       function hasn't yet been called in the course of the program's execution, the current
       locale is that which was determined by the "ENVIRONMENT" in effect at the start of the
       program.  If there is no valid environment, the current locale is whatever the system
       default has been set to.   On POSIX systems, it is likely, but not necessarily, the "C"
       locale.  On Windows, the default is set via the computer's
       "Control Panel->Regional and Language Options" (or its current equivalent).

       The operations that are affected by locale are:

       Not within the scope of "use locale"
           Only certain operations (all originating outside Perl) should be affected, as follows:

           •   The current locale is used when going outside of Perl with operations like
               system() or qx//, if those operations are locale-sensitive.

           •   Also Perl gives access to various C library functions through the POSIX module.
               Some of those functions are always affected by the current locale.  For example,
               "POSIX::strftime()" uses "LC_TIME"; "POSIX::strtod()" uses "LC_NUMERIC";
               "POSIX::strcoll()" and "POSIX::strxfrm()" use "LC_COLLATE".  All such functions
               will behave according to the current underlying locale, even if that locale isn't
               exposed to Perl space.

               This applies as well to I18N::Langinfo.

           •   XS modules for all categories but "LC_NUMERIC" get the underlying locale, and
               hence any C library functions they call will use that underlying locale.  For more
               discussion, see "CAVEATS" in perlxs.

           Note that all C programs (including the perl interpreter, which is written in C)
           always have an underlying locale.  That locale is the "C" locale unless changed by a
           call to setlocale().  When Perl starts up, it changes the underlying locale to the one
           which is indicated by the "ENVIRONMENT".  When using the POSIX module or writing XS
           code, it is important to keep in mind that the underlying locale may be something
           other than "C", even if the program hasn't explicitly changed it.

       Lingering effects of "use locale"
           Certain Perl operations that are set-up within the scope of a "use locale" retain that
           effect even outside the scope.  These include:

           •   The output format of a write() is determined by an earlier format declaration
               ("format" in perlfunc), so whether or not the output is affected by locale is
               determined by if the "format()" is within the scope of a "use locale", not whether
               the "write()" is.

           •   Regular expression patterns can be compiled using qr// with actual matching
               deferred to later.  Again, it is whether or not the compilation was done within
               the scope of "use locale" that determines the match behavior, not if the matches
               are done within such a scope or not.

       Under ""use locale";"
           •   All the above operations

           •   Format declarations ("format" in perlfunc) and hence any subsequent "write()"s use
               "LC_NUMERIC".

           •   stringification and output use "LC_NUMERIC".  These include the results of
               "print()", "printf()", "say()", and "sprintf()".

           •   The comparison operators ("lt", "le", "cmp", "ge", and "gt") use "LC_COLLATE".
               "sort()" is also affected if used without an explicit comparison function, because
               it uses "cmp" by default.

               Note: "eq" and "ne" are unaffected by locale: they always perform a char-by-char
               comparison of their scalar operands.  What's more, if "cmp" finds that its
               operands are equal according to the collation sequence specified by the current
               locale, it goes on to perform a char-by-char comparison, and only returns 0
               (equal) if the operands are char-for-char identical.  If you really want to know
               whether two strings--which "eq" and "cmp" may consider different--are equal as far
               as collation in the locale is concerned, see the discussion in "Category
               "LC_COLLATE": Collation".

           •   Regular expressions and case-modification functions ("uc()", "lc()", "ucfirst()",
               and "lcfirst()") use "LC_CTYPE"

           •   The variables $! (and its synonyms $ERRNO and $OS_ERROR) and $^E (and its synonym
               $EXTENDED_OS_ERROR) when used as strings use "LC_MESSAGES".

       The default behavior is restored with the "no locale" pragma, or upon reaching the end of
       the block enclosing "use locale".  Note that "use locale" calls may be nested, and that
       what is in effect within an inner scope will revert to the outer scope's rules at the end
       of the inner scope.

       The string result of any operation that uses locale information is tainted, as it is
       possible for a locale to be untrustworthy.  See "SECURITY".

       Starting in Perl v5.16 in a very limited way, and more generally in v5.22, you can
       restrict which category or categories are enabled by this particular instance of the
       pragma by adding parameters to it.  For example,

        use locale qw(:ctype :numeric);

       enables locale awareness within its scope of only those operations (listed above) that are
       affected by "LC_CTYPE" and "LC_NUMERIC".

       The possible categories are: ":collate", ":ctype", ":messages", ":monetary", ":numeric",
       ":time", and the pseudo category ":characters" (described below).

       Thus you can say

        use locale ':messages';

       and only $! and $^E will be locale aware.  Everything else is unaffected.

       Since Perl doesn't currently do anything with the "LC_MONETARY" category, specifying
       ":monetary" does effectively nothing.  Some systems have other categories, such as
       "LC_PAPER", but Perl also doesn't do anything with them, and there is no way to specify
       them in this pragma's arguments.

       You can also easily say to use all categories but one, by either, for example,

        use locale ':!ctype';
        use locale ':not_ctype';

       both of which mean to enable locale awarness of all categories but "LC_CTYPE".  Only one
       category argument may be specified in a "use locale" if it is of the negated form.

       Prior to v5.22 only one form of the pragma with arguments is available:

        use locale ':not_characters';

       (and you have to say "not_"; you can't use the bang "!" form).  This pseudo category is a
       shorthand for specifying both ":collate" and ":ctype".  Hence, in the negated form, it is
       nearly the same thing as saying

        use locale qw(:messages :monetary :numeric :time);

       We use the term "nearly", because ":not_characters" also turns on
       "use feature 'unicode_strings'" within its scope.  This form is less useful in v5.20 and
       later, and is described fully in "Unicode and UTF-8", but briefly, it tells Perl to not
       use the character portions of the locale definition, that is the "LC_CTYPE" and
       "LC_COLLATE" categories.  Instead it will use the native character set (extended by
       Unicode).  When using this parameter, you are responsible for getting the external
       character set translated into the native/Unicode one (which it already will be if it is
       one of the increasingly popular UTF-8 locales).  There are convenient ways of doing this,
       as described in "Unicode and UTF-8".

   The setlocale function
       WARNING!  Prior to Perl 5.28 or on a system that does not support thread-safe locale
       operations, do NOT use this function in a thread.  The locale will change in all other
       threads at the same time, and should your thread get paused by the operating system, and
       another started, that thread will not have the locale it is expecting.  On some platforms,
       there can be a race leading to segfaults if two threads call this function nearly
       simultaneously.

       You can switch locales as often as you wish at run time with the "POSIX::setlocale()"
       function:

               # Import locale-handling tool set from POSIX module.
               # This example uses: setlocale -- the function call
               #                    LC_CTYPE -- explained below
               # (Showing the testing for success/failure of operations is
               # omitted in these examples to avoid distracting from the main
               # point)

               use POSIX qw(locale_h);
               use locale;
               my $old_locale;

               # query and save the old locale
               $old_locale = setlocale(LC_CTYPE);

               setlocale(LC_CTYPE, "fr_CA.ISO8859-1");
               # LC_CTYPE now in locale "French, Canada, codeset ISO 8859-1"

               setlocale(LC_CTYPE, "");
               # LC_CTYPE now reset to the default defined by the
               # LC_ALL/LC_CTYPE/LANG environment variables, or to the system
               # default.  See below for documentation.

               # restore the old locale
               setlocale(LC_CTYPE, $old_locale);

       The first argument of "setlocale()" gives the category, the second the locale.  The
       category tells in what aspect of data processing you want to apply locale-specific rules.
       Category names are discussed in "LOCALE CATEGORIES" and "ENVIRONMENT".  The locale is the
       name of a collection of customization information corresponding to a particular
       combination of language, country or territory, and codeset.  Read on for hints on the
       naming of locales: not all systems name locales as in the example.

       If no second argument is provided and the category is something other than "LC_ALL", the
       function returns a string naming the current locale for the category.  You can use this
       value as the second argument in a subsequent call to "setlocale()", but on some platforms
       the string is opaque, not something that most people would be able to decipher as to what
       locale it means.

       If no second argument is provided and the category is "LC_ALL", the result is
       implementation-dependent.  It may be a string of concatenated locale names (separator also
       implementation-dependent) or a single locale name.  Please consult your setlocale(3) man
       page for details.

       If a second argument is given and it corresponds to a valid locale, the locale for the
       category is set to that value, and the function returns the now-current locale value.  You
       can then use this in yet another call to "setlocale()".  (In some implementations, the
       return value may sometimes differ from the value you gave as the second argument--think of
       it as an alias for the value you gave.)

       As the example shows, if the second argument is an empty string, the category's locale is
       returned to the default specified by the corresponding environment variables.  Generally,
       this results in a return to the default that was in force when Perl started up: changes to
       the environment made by the application after startup may or may not be noticed, depending
       on your system's C library.

       Note that when a form of "use locale" that doesn't include all categories is specified,
       Perl ignores the excluded categories.

       If "set_locale()" fails for some reason (for example, an attempt to set to a locale
       unknown to the system), the locale for the category is not changed, and the function
       returns "undef".

       Starting in Perl 5.28, on multi-threaded perls compiled on systems that implement POSIX
       2008 thread-safe locale operations, this function doesn't actually call the system
       "setlocale".  Instead those thread-safe operations are used to emulate the "setlocale"
       function, but in a thread-safe manner.

       You can force the thread-safe locale operations to always be used (if available) by
       recompiling perl with

        -Accflags='-DUSE_THREAD_SAFE_LOCALE'

       added to your call to Configure.

       For further information about the categories, consult setlocale(3).

   Multi-threaded operation
       Beginning in Perl 5.28, multi-threaded locale operation is supported on systems that
       implement either the POSIX 2008 or Windows-specific thread-safe locale operations.  Many
       modern systems, such as various Unix variants and Darwin do have this.

       You can tell if using locales is safe on your system by looking at the read-only boolean
       variable "${^SAFE_LOCALES}".  The value is 1 if the perl is not threaded, or if it is
       using thread-safe locale operations.

       Thread-safe operations are supported in Windows starting in Visual Studio 2005, and in
       systems compatible with POSIX 2008.  Some platforms claim to support POSIX 2008, but have
       buggy implementations, so that the hints files for compiling to run on them turn off
       attempting to use thread-safety.  "${^SAFE_LOCALES}" will be 0 on them.

       Be aware that writing a multi-threaded application will not be portable to a platform
       which lacks the native thread-safe locale support.  On systems that do have it, you
       automatically get this behavior for threaded perls, without having to do anything.  If for
       some reason, you don't want to use this capability (perhaps the POSIX 2008 support is
       buggy on your system), you can manually compile Perl to use the old non-thread-safe
       implementation by passing the argument "-Accflags='-DNO_THREAD_SAFE_LOCALE'" to Configure.
       Except on Windows, this will continue to use certain of the POSIX 2008 functions in some
       situations.  If these are buggy, you can pass the following to Configure instead or
       additionally: "-Accflags='-DNO_POSIX_2008_LOCALE'".  This will also keep the code from
       using thread-safe locales.  "${^SAFE_LOCALES}" will be 0 on systems that turn off the
       thread-safe operations.

       Normally on unthreaded builds, the traditional "setlocale()" is used and not the thread-
       safe locale functions.  You can force the use of these on systems that have them by adding
       the "-Accflags='-DUSE_THREAD_SAFE_LOCALE'" to Configure.

       The initial program is started up using the locale specified from the environment, as
       currently, described in "ENVIRONMENT".   All newly created threads start with "LC_ALL" set
       to "C">.  Each thread may use "POSIX::setlocale()" to query or switch its locale at any
       time, without affecting any other thread.  All locale-dependent operations automatically
       use their thread's locale.

       This should be completely transparent to any applications written entirely in Perl (minus
       a few rarely encountered caveats given in the "Multi-threaded" section).  Information for
       XS module writers is given in "Locale-aware XS code" in perlxs.

   Finding locales
       For locales available in your system, consult also setlocale(3) to see whether it leads to
       the list of available locales (search for the SEE ALSO section).  If that fails, try the
       following command lines:

               locale -a

               nlsinfo

               ls /usr/lib/nls/loc

               ls /usr/lib/locale

               ls /usr/lib/nls

               ls /usr/share/locale

       and see whether they list something resembling these

               en_US.ISO8859-1     de_DE.ISO8859-1     ru_RU.ISO8859-5
               en_US.iso88591      de_DE.iso88591      ru_RU.iso88595
               en_US               de_DE               ru_RU
               en                  de                  ru
               english             german              russian
               english.iso88591    german.iso88591     russian.iso88595
               english.roman8                          russian.koi8r

       Sadly, even though the calling interface for "setlocale()" has been standardized, names of
       locales and the directories where the configuration resides have not been.  The basic form
       of the name is language_territory.codeset, but the latter parts after language are not
       always present.  The language and country are usually from the standards ISO 3166 and ISO
       639, the two-letter abbreviations for the countries and the languages of the world,
       respectively.  The codeset part often mentions some ISO 8859 character set, the Latin
       codesets.  For example, "ISO 8859-1" is the so-called "Western European codeset" that can
       be used to encode most Western European languages adequately.  Again, there are several
       ways to write even the name of that one standard.  Lamentably.

       Two special locales are worth particular mention: "C" and "POSIX".  Currently these are
       effectively the same locale: the difference is mainly that the first one is defined by the
       C standard, the second by the POSIX standard.  They define the default locale in which
       every program starts in the absence of locale information in its environment.  (The
       default default locale, if you will.)  Its language is (American) English and its
       character codeset ASCII or, rarely, a superset thereof (such as the "DEC Multinational
       Character Set (DEC-MCS)").  Warning. The C locale delivered by some vendors may not
       actually exactly match what the C standard calls for.  So beware.

       NOTE: Not all systems have the "POSIX" locale (not all systems are POSIX-conformant), so
       use "C" when you need explicitly to specify this default locale.

   LOCALE PROBLEMS
       You may encounter the following warning message at Perl startup:

               perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
               perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
                       LC_ALL = "En_US",
                       LANG = (unset)
                   are supported and installed on your system.
               perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").

       This means that your locale settings had "LC_ALL" set to "En_US" and LANG exists but has
       no value.  Perl tried to believe you but could not.  Instead, Perl gave up and fell back
       to the "C" locale, the default locale that is supposed to work no matter what.  (On
       Windows, it first tries falling back to the system default locale.)  This usually means
       your locale settings were wrong, they mention locales your system has never heard of, or
       the locale installation in your system has problems (for example, some system files are
       broken or missing).  There are quick and temporary fixes to these problems, as well as
       more thorough and lasting fixes.

   Testing for broken locales
       If you are building Perl from source, the Perl test suite file lib/locale.t can be used to
       test the locales on your system.  Setting the environment variable "PERL_DEBUG_FULL_TEST"
       to 1 will cause it to output detailed results.  For example, on Linux, you could say

        PERL_DEBUG_FULL_TEST=1 ./perl -T -Ilib lib/locale.t > locale.log 2>&1

       Besides many other tests, it will test every locale it finds on your system to see if they
       conform to the POSIX standard.  If any have errors, it will include a summary near the end
       of the output of which locales passed all its tests, and which failed, and why.

   Temporarily fixing locale problems
       The two quickest fixes are either to render Perl silent about any locale inconsistencies
       or to run Perl under the default locale "C".

       Perl's moaning about locale problems can be silenced by setting the environment variable
       "PERL_BADLANG" to "0" or "".  This method really just sweeps the problem under the carpet:
       you tell Perl to shut up even when Perl sees that something is wrong.  Do not be surprised
       if later something locale-dependent misbehaves.

       Perl can be run under the "C" locale by setting the environment variable "LC_ALL" to "C".
       This method is perhaps a bit more civilized than the "PERL_BADLANG" approach, but setting
       "LC_ALL" (or other locale variables) may affect other programs as well, not just Perl.  In
       particular, external programs run from within Perl will see these changes.  If you make
       the new settings permanent (read on), all programs you run see the changes.  See
       "ENVIRONMENT" for the full list of relevant environment variables and "USING LOCALES" for
       their effects in Perl.  Effects in other programs are easily deducible.  For example, the
       variable "LC_COLLATE" may well affect your sort program (or whatever the program that
       arranges "records" alphabetically in your system is called).

       You can test out changing these variables temporarily, and if the new settings seem to
       help, put those settings into your shell startup files.  Consult your local documentation
       for the exact details.  For Bourne-like shells (sh, ksh, bash, zsh):

               LC_ALL=en_US.ISO8859-1
               export LC_ALL

       This assumes that we saw the locale "en_US.ISO8859-1" using the commands discussed above.
       We decided to try that instead of the above faulty locale "En_US"--and in Cshish shells
       (csh, tcsh)

               setenv LC_ALL en_US.ISO8859-1

       or if you have the "env" application you can do (in any shell)

               env LC_ALL=en_US.ISO8859-1 perl ...

       If you do not know what shell you have, consult your local helpdesk or the equivalent.

   Permanently fixing locale problems
       The slower but superior fixes are when you may be able to yourself fix the
       misconfiguration of your own environment variables.  The mis(sing)configuration of the
       whole system's locales usually requires the help of your friendly system administrator.

       First, see earlier in this document about "Finding locales".  That tells how to find which
       locales are really supported--and more importantly, installed--on your system.  In our
       example error message, environment variables affecting the locale are listed in the order
       of decreasing importance (and unset variables do not matter).  Therefore, having LC_ALL
       set to "En_US" must have been the bad choice, as shown by the error message.  First try
       fixing locale settings listed first.

       Second, if using the listed commands you see something exactly (prefix matches do not
       count and case usually counts) like "En_US" without the quotes, then you should be okay
       because you are using a locale name that should be installed and available in your system.
       In this case, see "Permanently fixing your system's locale configuration".

   Permanently fixing your system's locale configuration
       This is when you see something like:

               perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
                       LC_ALL = "En_US",
                       LANG = (unset)
                   are supported and installed on your system.

       but then cannot see that "En_US" listed by the above-mentioned commands.  You may see
       things like "en_US.ISO8859-1", but that isn't the same.  In this case, try running under a
       locale that you can list and which somehow matches what you tried.  The rules for matching
       locale names are a bit vague because standardization is weak in this area.  See again the
       "Finding locales" about general rules.

   Fixing system locale configuration
       Contact a system administrator (preferably your own) and report the exact error message
       you get, and ask them to read this same documentation you are now reading.  They should be
       able to check whether there is something wrong with the locale configuration of the
       system.  The "Finding locales" section is unfortunately a bit vague about the exact
       commands and places because these things are not that standardized.

   The localeconv function
       The "POSIX::localeconv()" function allows you to get particulars of the locale-dependent
       numeric formatting information specified by the current underlying "LC_NUMERIC" and
       "LC_MONETARY" locales (regardless of whether called from within the scope of "use locale"
       or not).  (If you just want the name of the current locale for a particular category, use
       "POSIX::setlocale()" with a single parameter--see "The setlocale function".)

               use POSIX qw(locale_h);

               # Get a reference to a hash of locale-dependent info
               $locale_values = localeconv();

               # Output sorted list of the values
               for (sort keys %$locale_values) {
                   printf "%-20s = %s\n", $_, $locale_values->{$_}
               }

       "localeconv()" takes no arguments, and returns a reference to a hash.  The keys of this
       hash are variable names for formatting, such as "decimal_point" and "thousands_sep".  The
       values are the corresponding, er, values.  See "localeconv" in POSIX for a longer example
       listing the categories an implementation might be expected to provide; some provide more
       and others fewer.  You don't need an explicit "use locale", because "localeconv()" always
       observes the current locale.

       Here's a simple-minded example program that rewrites its command-line parameters as
       integers correctly formatted in the current locale:

           use POSIX qw(locale_h);

           # Get some of locale's numeric formatting parameters
           my ($thousands_sep, $grouping) =
                   @{localeconv()}{'thousands_sep', 'grouping'};

           # Apply defaults if values are missing
           $thousands_sep = ',' unless $thousands_sep;

           # grouping and mon_grouping are packed lists
           # of small integers (characters) telling the
           # grouping (thousand_seps and mon_thousand_seps
           # being the group dividers) of numbers and
           # monetary quantities.  The integers' meanings:
           # 255 means no more grouping, 0 means repeat
           # the previous grouping, 1-254 means use that
           # as the current grouping.  Grouping goes from
           # right to left (low to high digits).  In the
           # below we cheat slightly by never using anything
           # else than the first grouping (whatever that is).
           if ($grouping) {
               @grouping = unpack("C*", $grouping);
           } else {
               @grouping = (3);
           }

           # Format command line params for current locale
           for (@ARGV) {
               $_ = int;    # Chop non-integer part
               1 while
               s/(\d)(\d{$grouping[0]}($|$thousands_sep))/$1$thousands_sep$2/;
               print "$_";
           }
           print "\n";

       Note that if the platform doesn't have "LC_NUMERIC" and/or "LC_MONETARY" available or
       enabled, the corresponding elements of the hash will be missing.

   I18N::Langinfo
       Another interface for querying locale-dependent information is the
       "I18N::Langinfo::langinfo()" function.

       The following example will import the "langinfo()" function itself and three constants to
       be used as arguments to "langinfo()": a constant for the abbreviated first day of the week
       (the numbering starts from Sunday = 1) and two more constants for the affirmative and
       negative answers for a yes/no question in the current locale.

           use I18N::Langinfo qw(langinfo ABDAY_1 YESSTR NOSTR);

           my ($abday_1, $yesstr, $nostr)
                       = map { langinfo } qw(ABDAY_1 YESSTR NOSTR);

           print "$abday_1? [$yesstr/$nostr] ";

       In other words, in the "C" (or English) locale the above will probably print something
       like:

           Sun? [yes/no]

       See I18N::Langinfo for more information.

LOCALE CATEGORIES

       The following subsections describe basic locale categories.  Beyond these, some
       combination categories allow manipulation of more than one basic category at a time.  See
       "ENVIRONMENT" for a discussion of these.

   Category "LC_COLLATE": Collation: Text Comparisons and Sorting
       In the scope of a "use locale" form that includes collation, Perl looks to the
       "LC_COLLATE" environment variable to determine the application's notions on collation
       (ordering) of characters.  For example, "b" follows "a" in Latin alphabets, but where do
       "á" and "å" belong?  And while "color" follows "chocolate" in English, what about in
       traditional Spanish?

       The following collations all make sense and you may meet any of them if you "use locale".

               A B C D E a b c d e
               A a B b C c D d E e
               a A b B c C d D e E
               a b c d e A B C D E

       Here is a code snippet to tell what "word" characters are in the current locale, in that
       locale's order:

               use locale;
               print +(sort grep /\w/, map { chr } 0..255), "\n";

       Compare this with the characters that you see and their order if you state explicitly that
       the locale should be ignored:

               no locale;
               print +(sort grep /\w/, map { chr } 0..255), "\n";

       This machine-native collation (which is what you get unless "use locale" has appeared
       earlier in the same block) must be used for sorting raw binary data, whereas the locale-
       dependent collation of the first example is useful for natural text.

       As noted in "USING LOCALES", "cmp" compares according to the current collation locale when
       "use locale" is in effect, but falls back to a char-by-char comparison for strings that
       the locale says are equal. You can use "POSIX::strcoll()" if you don't want this fall-
       back:

               use POSIX qw(strcoll);
               $equal_in_locale =
                   !strcoll("space and case ignored", "SpaceAndCaseIgnored");

       $equal_in_locale will be true if the collation locale specifies a dictionary-like ordering
       that ignores space characters completely and which folds case.

       Perl uses the platform's C library collation functions "strcoll()" and "strxfrm()".  That
       means you get whatever they give.  On some platforms, these functions work well on UTF-8
       locales, giving a reasonable default collation for the code points that are important in
       that locale.  (And if they aren't working well, the problem may only be that the locale
       definition is deficient, so can be fixed by using a better definition file.  Unicode's
       definitions (see "Freely available locale definitions") provide reasonable UTF-8 locale
       collation definitions.)  Starting in Perl v5.26, Perl's use of these functions has been
       made more seamless.  This may be sufficient for your needs.  For more control, and to make
       sure strings containing any code point (not just the ones important in the locale) collate
       properly, the Unicode::Collate module is suggested.

       In non-UTF-8 locales (hence single byte), code points above 0xFF are technically invalid.
       But if present, again starting in v5.26, they will collate to the same position as the
       highest valid code point does.  This generally gives good results, but the collation order
       may be skewed if the valid code point gets special treatment when it forms particular
       sequences with other characters as defined by the locale.  When two strings collate
       identically, the code point order is used as a tie breaker.

       If Perl detects that there are problems with the locale collation order, it reverts to
       using non-locale collation rules for that locale.

       If you have a single string that you want to check for "equality in locale" against
       several others, you might think you could gain a little efficiency by using
       "POSIX::strxfrm()" in conjunction with "eq":

               use POSIX qw(strxfrm);
               $xfrm_string = strxfrm("Mixed-case string");
               print "locale collation ignores spaces\n"
                   if $xfrm_string eq strxfrm("Mixed-casestring");
               print "locale collation ignores hyphens\n"
                   if $xfrm_string eq strxfrm("Mixedcase string");
               print "locale collation ignores case\n"
                   if $xfrm_string eq strxfrm("mixed-case string");

       "strxfrm()" takes a string and maps it into a transformed string for use in char-by-char
       comparisons against other transformed strings during collation.  "Under the hood", locale-
       affected Perl comparison operators call "strxfrm()" for both operands, then do a char-by-
       char comparison of the transformed strings.  By calling "strxfrm()" explicitly and using a
       non locale-affected comparison, the example attempts to save a couple of transformations.
       But in fact, it doesn't save anything: Perl magic (see "Magic Variables" in perlguts)
       creates the transformed version of a string the first time it's needed in a comparison,
       then keeps this version around in case it's needed again.  An example rewritten the easy
       way with "cmp" runs just about as fast.  It also copes with null characters embedded in
       strings; if you call "strxfrm()" directly, it treats the first null it finds as a
       terminator.  Don't expect the transformed strings it produces to be portable across
       systems--or even from one revision of your operating system to the next.  In short, don't
       call "strxfrm()" directly: let Perl do it for you.

       Note: "use locale" isn't shown in some of these examples because it isn't needed:
       "strcoll()" and "strxfrm()" are POSIX functions which use the standard system-supplied
       "libc" functions that always obey the current "LC_COLLATE" locale.

   Category "LC_CTYPE": Character Types
       In the scope of a "use locale" form that includes "LC_CTYPE", Perl obeys the "LC_CTYPE"
       locale setting.  This controls the application's notion of which characters are
       alphabetic, numeric, punctuation, etc.  This affects Perl's "\w" regular expression
       metanotation, which stands for alphanumeric characters--that is, alphabetic, numeric, and
       the platform's native underscore.  (Consult perlre for more information about regular
       expressions.)  Thanks to "LC_CTYPE", depending on your locale setting, characters like
       "æ", "ð", "ß", and "ø" may be understood as "\w" characters.  It also affects things like
       "\s", "\D", and the POSIX character classes, like "[[:graph:]]".  (See perlrecharclass for
       more information on all these.)

       The "LC_CTYPE" locale also provides the map used in transliterating characters between
       lower and uppercase.  This affects the case-mapping functions--"fc()", "lc()",
       "lcfirst()", "uc()", and "ucfirst()"; case-mapping interpolation with "\F", "\l", "\L",
       "\u", or "\U" in double-quoted strings and "s///" substitutions; and case-insensitive
       regular expression pattern matching using the "i" modifier.

       Starting in v5.20, Perl supports UTF-8 locales for "LC_CTYPE", but otherwise Perl only
       supports single-byte locales, such as the ISO 8859 series.  This means that wide character
       locales, for example for Asian languages, are not well-supported.  Use of these locales
       may cause core dumps.  If the platform has the capability for Perl to detect such a
       locale, starting in Perl v5.22, Perl will warn, default enabled, using the "locale"
       warning category, whenever such a locale is switched into.  The UTF-8 locale support is
       actually a superset of POSIX locales, because it is really full Unicode behavior as if no
       "LC_CTYPE" locale were in effect at all (except for tainting; see "SECURITY").  POSIX
       locales, even UTF-8 ones, are lacking certain concepts in Unicode, such as the idea that
       changing the case of a character could expand to be more than one character.  Perl in a
       UTF-8 locale, will give you that expansion.  Prior to v5.20, Perl treated a UTF-8 locale
       on some platforms like an ISO 8859-1 one, with some restrictions, and on other platforms
       more like the "C" locale.  For releases v5.16 and v5.18, "use locale 'not_characters"
       could be used as a workaround for this (see "Unicode and UTF-8").

       Note that there are quite a few things that are unaffected by the current locale.  Any
       literal character is the native character for the given platform.  Hence 'A' means the
       character at code point 65 on ASCII platforms, and 193 on EBCDIC.  That may or may not be
       an 'A' in the current locale, if that locale even has an 'A'.  Similarly, all the escape
       sequences for particular characters, "\n" for example, always mean the platform's native
       one.  This means, for example, that "\N" in regular expressions (every character but new-
       line) works on the platform character set.

       Starting in v5.22, Perl will by default warn when switching into a locale that redefines
       any ASCII printable character (plus "\t" and "\n") into a different class than expected.
       This is likely to happen on modern locales only on EBCDIC platforms, where, for example, a
       CCSID 0037 locale on a CCSID 1047 machine moves "[", but it can happen on ASCII platforms
       with the ISO 646 and other 7-bit locales that are essentially obsolete.  Things may still
       work, depending on what features of Perl are used by the program.  For example, in the
       example from above where "|" becomes a "\w", and there are no regular expressions where
       this matters, the program may still work properly.  The warning lists all the characters
       that it can determine could be adversely affected.

       Note: A broken or malicious "LC_CTYPE" locale definition may result in clearly ineligible
       characters being considered to be alphanumeric by your application.  For strict matching
       of (mundane) ASCII letters and digits--for example, in command strings--locale-aware
       applications should use "\w" with the "/a" regular expression modifier.  See "SECURITY".

   Category "LC_NUMERIC": Numeric Formatting
       After a proper "POSIX::setlocale()" call, and within the scope of of a "use locale" form
       that includes numerics, Perl obeys the "LC_NUMERIC" locale information, which controls an
       application's idea of how numbers should be formatted for human readability.  In most
       implementations the only effect is to change the character used for the decimal
       point--perhaps from "."  to ",".  The functions aren't aware of such niceties as thousands
       separation and so on. (See "The localeconv function" if you care about these things.)

        use POSIX qw(strtod setlocale LC_NUMERIC);
        use locale;

        setlocale LC_NUMERIC, "";

        $n = 5/2;   # Assign numeric 2.5 to $n

        $a = " $n"; # Locale-dependent conversion to string

        print "half five is $n\n";       # Locale-dependent output

        printf "half five is %g\n", $n;  # Locale-dependent output

        print "DECIMAL POINT IS COMMA\n"
                 if $n == (strtod("2,5"))[0]; # Locale-dependent conversion

       See also I18N::Langinfo and "RADIXCHAR".

   Category "LC_MONETARY": Formatting of monetary amounts
       The C standard defines the "LC_MONETARY" category, but not a function that is affected by
       its contents.  (Those with experience of standards committees will recognize that the
       working group decided to punt on the issue.)  Consequently, Perl essentially takes no
       notice of it.  If you really want to use "LC_MONETARY", you can query its contents--see
       "The localeconv function"--and use the information that it returns in your application's
       own formatting of currency amounts.  However, you may well find that the information,
       voluminous and complex though it may be, still does not quite meet your requirements:
       currency formatting is a hard nut to crack.

       See also I18N::Langinfo and "CRNCYSTR".

   Category "LC_TIME": Respresentation of time
       Output produced by "POSIX::strftime()", which builds a formatted human-readable date/time
       string, is affected by the current "LC_TIME" locale.  Thus, in a French locale, the output
       produced by the %B format element (full month name) for the first month of the year would
       be "janvier".  Here's how to get a list of long month names in the current locale:

               use POSIX qw(strftime);
               for (0..11) {
                   $long_month_name[$_] =
                       strftime("%B", 0, 0, 0, 1, $_, 96);
               }

       Note: "use locale" isn't needed in this example: "strftime()" is a POSIX function which
       uses the standard system-supplied "libc" function that always obeys the current "LC_TIME"
       locale.

       See also I18N::Langinfo and "ABDAY_1".."ABDAY_7", "DAY_1".."DAY_7", "ABMON_1".."ABMON_12",
       and "ABMON_1".."ABMON_12".

   Other categories
       The remaining locale categories are not currently used by Perl itself.  But again note
       that things Perl interacts with may use these, including extensions outside the standard
       Perl distribution, and by the operating system and its utilities.  Note especially that
       the string value of $! and the error messages given by external utilities may be changed
       by "LC_MESSAGES".  If you want to have portable error codes, use "%!".  See Errno.

SECURITY

       Although the main discussion of Perl security issues can be found in perlsec, a discussion
       of Perl's locale handling would be incomplete if it did not draw your attention to locale-
       dependent security issues.  Locales--particularly on systems that allow unprivileged users
       to build their own locales--are untrustworthy.  A malicious (or just plain broken) locale
       can make a locale-aware application give unexpected results.  Here are a few
       possibilities:

       •   Regular expression checks for safe file names or mail addresses using "\w" may be
           spoofed by an "LC_CTYPE" locale that claims that characters such as ">" and "|" are
           alphanumeric.

       •   String interpolation with case-mapping, as in, say, "$dest = "C:\U$name.$ext"", may
           produce dangerous results if a bogus "LC_CTYPE" case-mapping table is in effect.

       •   A sneaky "LC_COLLATE" locale could result in the names of students with "D" grades
           appearing ahead of those with "A"s.

       •   An application that takes the trouble to use information in "LC_MONETARY" may format
           debits as if they were credits and vice versa if that locale has been subverted.  Or
           it might make payments in US dollars instead of Hong Kong dollars.

       •   The date and day names in dates formatted by "strftime()" could be manipulated to
           advantage by a malicious user able to subvert the "LC_DATE" locale.  ("Look--it says I
           wasn't in the building on Sunday.")

       Such dangers are not peculiar to the locale system: any aspect of an application's
       environment which may be modified maliciously presents similar challenges.  Similarly,
       they are not specific to Perl: any programming language that allows you to write programs
       that take account of their environment exposes you to these issues.

       Perl cannot protect you from all possibilities shown in the examples--there is no
       substitute for your own vigilance--but, when "use locale" is in effect, Perl uses the
       tainting mechanism (see perlsec) to mark string results that become locale-dependent, and
       which may be untrustworthy in consequence.  Here is a summary of the tainting behavior of
       operators and functions that may be affected by the locale:

       •   Comparison operators ("lt", "le", "ge", "gt" and "cmp"):

           Scalar true/false (or less/equal/greater) result is never tainted.

       •   Case-mapping interpolation (with "\l", "\L", "\u", "\U", or "\F")

           The result string containing interpolated material is tainted if a "use locale" form
           that includes "LC_CTYPE" is in effect.

       •   Matching operator ("m//"):

           Scalar true/false result never tainted.

           All subpatterns, either delivered as a list-context result or as $1 etc., are tainted
           if a "use locale" form that includes "LC_CTYPE" is in effect, and the subpattern
           regular expression contains a locale-dependent construct.  These constructs include
           "\w" (to match an alphanumeric character), "\W" (non-alphanumeric character), "\b" and
           "\B" (word-boundary and non-boundardy, which depend on what "\w" and "\W" match), "\s"
           (whitespace character), "\S" (non whitespace character), "\d" and "\D" (digits and
           non-digits), and the POSIX character classes, such as "[:alpha:]" (see "POSIX
           Character Classes" in perlrecharclass).

           Tainting is also likely if the pattern is to be matched case-insensitively (via "/i").
           The exception is if all the code points to be matched this way are above 255 and do
           not have folds under Unicode rules to below 256.  Tainting is not done for these
           because Perl only uses Unicode rules for such code points, and those rules are the
           same no matter what the current locale.

           The matched-pattern variables, $&, "$`" (pre-match), "$'" (post-match), and $+ (last
           match) also are tainted.

       •   Substitution operator ("s///"):

           Has the same behavior as the match operator.  Also, the left operand of "=~" becomes
           tainted when a "use locale" form that includes "LC_CTYPE" is in effect, if modified as
           a result of a substitution based on a regular expression match involving any of the
           things mentioned in the previous item, or of case-mapping, such as "\l", "\L","\u",
           "\U", or "\F".

       •   Output formatting functions ("printf()" and "write()"):

           Results are never tainted because otherwise even output from print, for example
           "print(1/7)", should be tainted if "use locale" is in effect.

       •   Case-mapping functions ("lc()", "lcfirst()", "uc()", "ucfirst()"):

           Results are tainted if a "use locale" form that includes "LC_CTYPE" is in effect.

       •   POSIX locale-dependent functions ("localeconv()", "strcoll()", "strftime()",
           "strxfrm()"):

           Results are never tainted.

       Three examples illustrate locale-dependent tainting.  The first program, which ignores its
       locale, won't run: a value taken directly from the command line may not be used to name an
       output file when taint checks are enabled.

               #/usr/local/bin/perl -T
               # Run with taint checking

               # Command line sanity check omitted...
               $tainted_output_file = shift;

               open(F, ">$tainted_output_file")
                   or warn "Open of $tainted_output_file failed: $!\n";

       The program can be made to run by "laundering" the tainted value through a regular
       expression: the second example--which still ignores locale information--runs, creating the
       file named on its command line if it can.

               #/usr/local/bin/perl -T

               $tainted_output_file = shift;
               $tainted_output_file =~ m%[\w/]+%;
               $untainted_output_file = $&;

               open(F, ">$untainted_output_file")
                   or warn "Open of $untainted_output_file failed: $!\n";

       Compare this with a similar but locale-aware program:

               #/usr/local/bin/perl -T

               $tainted_output_file = shift;
               use locale;
               $tainted_output_file =~ m%[\w/]+%;
               $localized_output_file = $&;

               open(F, ">$localized_output_file")
                   or warn "Open of $localized_output_file failed: $!\n";

       This third program fails to run because $& is tainted: it is the result of a match
       involving "\w" while "use locale" is in effect.

ENVIRONMENT

       PERL_SKIP_LOCALE_INIT
                   This environment variable, available starting in Perl v5.20, if set (to any
                   value), tells Perl to not use the rest of the environment variables to
                   initialize with.  Instead, Perl uses whatever the current locale settings are.
                   This is particularly useful in embedded environments, see "Using embedded Perl
                   with POSIX locales" in perlembed.

       PERL_BADLANG
                   A string that can suppress Perl's warning about failed locale settings at
                   startup.  Failure can occur if the locale support in the operating system is
                   lacking (broken) in some way--or if you mistyped the name of a locale when you
                   set up your environment.  If this environment variable is absent, or has a
                   value other than "0" or "", Perl will complain about locale setting failures.

                   NOTE: "PERL_BADLANG" only gives you a way to hide the warning message.  The
                   message tells about some problem in your system's locale support, and you
                   should investigate what the problem is.

       DPKG_RUNNING_VERSION
                   On Debian systems, if the DPKG_RUNNING_VERSION environment variable is set (to
                   any value), the locale failure warnings will be suppressed just like with a
                   zero PERL_BADLANG setting. This is done to avoid floods of spurious warnings
                   during system upgrades.  See <http://bugs.debian.org/508764>.

       The following environment variables are not specific to Perl: They are part of the
       standardized (ISO C, XPG4, POSIX 1.c) "setlocale()" method for controlling an
       application's opinion on data.  Windows is non-POSIX, but Perl arranges for the following
       to work as described anyway.  If the locale given by an environment variable is not valid,
       Perl tries the next lower one in priority.  If none are valid, on Windows, the system
       default locale is then tried.  If all else fails, the "C" locale is used.  If even that
       doesn't work, something is badly broken, but Perl tries to forge ahead with whatever the
       locale settings might be.

       "LC_ALL"    "LC_ALL" is the "override-all" locale environment variable. If set, it
                   overrides all the rest of the locale environment variables.

       "LANGUAGE"  NOTE: "LANGUAGE" is a GNU extension, it affects you only if you are using the
                   GNU libc.  This is the case if you are using e.g. Linux.  If you are using
                   "commercial" Unixes you are most probably not using GNU libc and you can
                   ignore "LANGUAGE".

                   However, in the case you are using "LANGUAGE": it affects the language of
                   informational, warning, and error messages output by commands (in other words,
                   it's like "LC_MESSAGES") but it has higher priority than "LC_ALL".  Moreover,
                   it's not a single value but instead a "path" (":"-separated list) of languages
                   (not locales).  See the GNU "gettext" library documentation for more
                   information.

       "LC_CTYPE"  In the absence of "LC_ALL", "LC_CTYPE" chooses the character type locale.  In
                   the absence of both "LC_ALL" and "LC_CTYPE", "LANG" chooses the character type
                   locale.

       "LC_COLLATE"
                   In the absence of "LC_ALL", "LC_COLLATE" chooses the collation (sorting)
                   locale.  In the absence of both "LC_ALL" and "LC_COLLATE", "LANG" chooses the
                   collation locale.

       "LC_MONETARY"
                   In the absence of "LC_ALL", "LC_MONETARY" chooses the monetary formatting
                   locale.  In the absence of both "LC_ALL" and "LC_MONETARY", "LANG" chooses the
                   monetary formatting locale.

       "LC_NUMERIC"
                   In the absence of "LC_ALL", "LC_NUMERIC" chooses the numeric format locale.
                   In the absence of both "LC_ALL" and "LC_NUMERIC", "LANG" chooses the numeric
                   format.

       "LC_TIME"   In the absence of "LC_ALL", "LC_TIME" chooses the date and time formatting
                   locale.  In the absence of both "LC_ALL" and "LC_TIME", "LANG" chooses the
                   date and time formatting locale.

       "LANG"      "LANG" is the "catch-all" locale environment variable. If it is set, it is
                   used as the last resort after the overall "LC_ALL" and the category-specific
                   "LC_foo".

   Examples
       The "LC_NUMERIC" controls the numeric output:

          use locale;
          use POSIX qw(locale_h); # Imports setlocale() and the LC_ constants.
          setlocale(LC_NUMERIC, "fr_FR") or die "Pardon";
          printf "%g\n", 1.23; # If the "fr_FR" succeeded, probably shows 1,23.

       and also how strings are parsed by "POSIX::strtod()" as numbers:

          use locale;
          use POSIX qw(locale_h strtod);
          setlocale(LC_NUMERIC, "de_DE") or die "Entschuldigung";
          my $x = strtod("2,34") + 5;
          print $x, "\n"; # Probably shows 7,34.

NOTES

   String "eval" and "LC_NUMERIC"
       A string eval parses its expression as standard Perl.  It is therefore expecting the
       decimal point to be a dot.  If "LC_NUMERIC" is set to have this be a comma instead, the
       parsing will be confused, perhaps silently.

        use locale;
        use POSIX qw(locale_h);
        setlocale(LC_NUMERIC, "fr_FR") or die "Pardon";
        my $a = 1.2;
        print eval "$a + 1.5";
        print "\n";

       prints "13,5".  This is because in that locale, the comma is the decimal point character.
       The "eval" thus expands to:

        eval "1,2 + 1.5"

       and the result is not what you likely expected.  No warnings are generated.  If you do
       string "eval"'s within the scope of "use locale", you should instead change the "eval"
       line to do something like:

        print eval "no locale; $a + 1.5";

       This prints 2.7.

       You could also exclude "LC_NUMERIC", if you don't need it, by

        use locale ':!numeric';

   Backward compatibility
       Versions of Perl prior to 5.004 mostly ignored locale information, generally behaving as
       if something similar to the "C" locale were always in force, even if the program
       environment suggested otherwise (see "The setlocale function").  By default, Perl still
       behaves this way for backward compatibility.  If you want a Perl application to pay
       attention to locale information, you must use the "use locale" pragma (see "The "use
       locale" pragma") or, in the unlikely event that you want to do so for just pattern
       matching, the "/l" regular expression modifier (see "Character set modifiers" in perlre)
       to instruct it to do so.

       Versions of Perl from 5.002 to 5.003 did use the "LC_CTYPE" information if available; that
       is, "\w" did understand what were the letters according to the locale environment
       variables.  The problem was that the user had no control over the feature: if the C
       library supported locales, Perl used them.

   I18N:Collate obsolete
       In versions of Perl prior to 5.004, per-locale collation was possible using the
       "I18N::Collate" library module.  This module is now mildly obsolete and should be avoided
       in new applications.  The "LC_COLLATE" functionality is now integrated into the Perl core
       language: One can use locale-specific scalar data completely normally with "use locale",
       so there is no longer any need to juggle with the scalar references of "I18N::Collate".

   Sort speed and memory use impacts
       Comparing and sorting by locale is usually slower than the default sorting; slow-downs of
       two to four times have been observed.  It will also consume more memory: once a Perl
       scalar variable has participated in any string comparison or sorting operation obeying the
       locale collation rules, it will take 3-15 times more memory than before.  (The exact
       multiplier depends on the string's contents, the operating system and the locale.) These
       downsides are dictated more by the operating system's implementation of the locale system
       than by Perl.

   Freely available locale definitions
       The Unicode CLDR project extracts the POSIX portion of many of its locales, available at

         http://unicode.org/Public/cldr/2.0.1/

       (Newer versions of CLDR require you to compute the POSIX data yourself.  See
       <http://unicode.org/Public/cldr/latest/>.)

       There is a large collection of locale definitions at:

         http://std.dkuug.dk/i18n/WG15-collection/locales/

       You should be aware that it is unsupported, and is not claimed to be fit for any purpose.
       If your system allows installation of arbitrary locales, you may find the definitions
       useful as they are, or as a basis for the development of your own locales.

   I18n and l10n
       "Internationalization" is often abbreviated as i18n because its first and last letters are
       separated by eighteen others.  (You may guess why the internalin ... internaliti ... i18n
       tends to get abbreviated.)  In the same way, "localization" is often abbreviated to l10n.

   An imperfect standard
       Internationalization, as defined in the C and POSIX standards, can be criticized as
       incomplete and ungainly.  They also have a tendency, like standards groups, to divide the
       world into nations, when we all know that the world can equally well be divided into
       bankers, bikers, gamers, and so on.

Unicode and UTF-8

       The support of Unicode is new starting from Perl version v5.6, and more fully implemented
       in versions v5.8 and later.  See perluniintro.

       Starting in Perl v5.20, UTF-8 locales are supported in Perl, except "LC_COLLATE" is only
       partially supported; collation support is improved in Perl v5.26 to a level that may be
       sufficient for your needs (see "Category "LC_COLLATE": Collation: Text Comparisons and
       Sorting").

       If you have Perl v5.16 or v5.18 and can't upgrade, you can use

           use locale ':not_characters';

       When this form of the pragma is used, only the non-character portions of locales are used
       by Perl, for example "LC_NUMERIC".  Perl assumes that you have translated all the
       characters it is to operate on into Unicode (actually the platform's native character set
       (ASCII or EBCDIC) plus Unicode).  For data in files, this can conveniently be done by also
       specifying

           use open ':locale';

       This pragma arranges for all inputs from files to be translated into Unicode from the
       current locale as specified in the environment (see "ENVIRONMENT"), and all outputs to
       files to be translated back into the locale.  (See open).  On a per-filehandle basis, you
       can instead use the PerlIO::locale module, or the Encode::Locale module, both available
       from CPAN.  The latter module also has methods to ease the handling of "ARGV" and
       environment variables, and can be used on individual strings.  If you know that all your
       locales will be UTF-8, as many are these days, you can use the -C command line switch.

       This form of the pragma allows essentially seamless handling of locales with Unicode.  The
       collation order will be by Unicode code point order.  Unicode::Collate can be used to get
       Unicode rules collation.

       All the modules and switches just described can be used in v5.20 with just plain "use
       locale", and, should the input locales not be UTF-8, you'll get the less than ideal
       behavior, described below, that you get with pre-v5.16 Perls, or when you use the locale
       pragma without the ":not_characters" parameter in v5.16 and v5.18.  If you are using
       exclusively UTF-8 locales in v5.20 and higher, the rest of this section does not apply to
       you.

       There are two cases, multi-byte and single-byte locales.  First multi-byte:

       The only multi-byte (or wide character) locale that Perl is ever likely to support is
       UTF-8.  This is due to the difficulty of implementation, the fact that high quality UTF-8
       locales are now published for every area of the world
       (<http://unicode.org/Public/cldr/2.0.1/> for ones that are already set-up, but from an
       earlier version; <http://unicode.org/Public/cldr/latest/> for the most up-to-date, but you
       have to extract the POSIX information yourself), and that failing all that you can use the
       Encode module to translate to/from your locale.  So, you'll have to do one of those things
       if you're using one of these locales, such as Big5 or Shift JIS.  For UTF-8 locales, in
       Perls (pre v5.20) that don't have full UTF-8 locale support, they may work reasonably well
       (depending on your C library implementation) simply because both they and Perl store
       characters that take up multiple bytes the same way.  However, some, if not most, C
       library implementations may not process the characters in the upper half of the Latin-1
       range (128 - 255) properly under "LC_CTYPE".  To see if a character is a particular type
       under a locale, Perl uses the functions like "isalnum()".  Your C library may not work for
       UTF-8 locales with those functions, instead only working under the newer wide library
       functions like "iswalnum()", which Perl does not use.  These multi-byte locales are
       treated like single-byte locales, and will have the restrictions described below.
       Starting in Perl v5.22 a warning message is raised when Perl detects a multi-byte locale
       that it doesn't fully support.

       For single-byte locales, Perl generally takes the tack to use locale rules on code points
       that can fit in a single byte, and Unicode rules for those that can't (though this isn't
       uniformly applied, see the note at the end of this section).  This prevents many problems
       in locales that aren't UTF-8.  Suppose the locale is ISO8859-7, Greek.  The character at
       0xD7 there is a capital Chi. But in the ISO8859-1 locale, Latin1, it is a multiplication
       sign.  The POSIX regular expression character class "[[:alpha:]]" will magically match
       0xD7 in the Greek locale but not in the Latin one.

       However, there are places where this breaks down.  Certain Perl constructs are for Unicode
       only, such as "\p{Alpha}".  They assume that 0xD7 always has its Unicode meaning (or the
       equivalent on EBCDIC platforms).  Since Latin1 is a subset of Unicode and 0xD7 is the
       multiplication sign in both Latin1 and Unicode, "\p{Alpha}" will never match it,
       regardless of locale.  A similar issue occurs with "\N{...}".  Prior to v5.20, it is
       therefore a bad idea to use "\p{}" or "\N{}" under plain "use locale"--unless you can
       guarantee that the locale will be ISO8859-1.  Use POSIX character classes instead.

       Another problem with this approach is that operations that cross the single byte/multiple
       byte boundary are not well-defined, and so are disallowed.  (This boundary is between the
       codepoints at 255/256.)  For example, lower casing LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Y WITH DIAERESIS
       (U+0178) should return LATIN SMALL LETTER Y WITH DIAERESIS (U+00FF).  But in the Greek
       locale, for example, there is no character at 0xFF, and Perl has no way of knowing what
       the character at 0xFF is really supposed to represent.  Thus it disallows the operation.
       In this mode, the lowercase of U+0178 is itself.

       The same problems ensue if you enable automatic UTF-8-ification of your standard file
       handles, default "open()" layer, and @ARGV on non-ISO8859-1, non-UTF-8 locales (by using
       either the -C command line switch or the "PERL_UNICODE" environment variable; see
       perlrun).  Things are read in as UTF-8, which would normally imply a Unicode
       interpretation, but the presence of a locale causes them to be interpreted in that locale
       instead.  For example, a 0xD7 code point in the Unicode input, which should mean the
       multiplication sign, won't be interpreted by Perl that way under the Greek locale.  This
       is not a problem provided you make certain that all locales will always and only be either
       an ISO8859-1, or, if you don't have a deficient C library, a UTF-8 locale.

       Still another problem is that this approach can lead to two code points meaning the same
       character.  Thus in a Greek locale, both U+03A7 and U+00D7 are GREEK CAPITAL LETTER CHI.

       Because of all these problems, starting in v5.22, Perl will raise a warning if a multi-
       byte (hence Unicode) code point is used when a single-byte locale is in effect.  (Although
       it doesn't check for this if doing so would unreasonably slow execution down.)

       Vendor locales are notoriously buggy, and it is difficult for Perl to test its locale-
       handling code because this interacts with code that Perl has no control over; therefore
       the locale-handling code in Perl may be buggy as well.  (However, the Unicode-supplied
       locales should be better, and there is a feed back mechanism to correct any problems.  See
       "Freely available locale definitions".)

       If you have Perl v5.16, the problems mentioned above go away if you use the
       ":not_characters" parameter to the locale pragma (except for vendor bugs in the non-
       character portions).  If you don't have v5.16, and you do have locales that work, using
       them may be worthwhile for certain specific purposes, as long as you keep in mind the
       gotchas already mentioned.  For example, if the collation for your locales works, it runs
       faster under locales than under Unicode::Collate; and you gain access to such things as
       the local currency symbol and the names of the months and days of the week.  (But to
       hammer home the point, in v5.16, you get this access without the downsides of locales by
       using the ":not_characters" form of the pragma.)

       Note: The policy of using locale rules for code points that can fit in a byte, and Unicode
       rules for those that can't is not uniformly applied.  Pre-v5.12, it was somewhat
       haphazard; in v5.12 it was applied fairly consistently to regular expression matching
       except for bracketed character classes; in v5.14 it was extended to all regex matches; and
       in v5.16 to the casing operations such as "\L" and "uc()".  For collation, in all releases
       so far, the system's "strxfrm()" function is called, and whatever it does is what you get.
       Starting in v5.26, various bugs are fixed with the way perl uses this function.

BUGS

   Collation of strings containing embedded "NUL" characters
       "NUL" characters will sort the same as the lowest collating control character does, or to
       "\001" in the unlikely event that there are no control characters at all in the locale.
       In cases where the strings don't contain this non-"NUL" control, the results will be
       correct, and in many locales, this control, whatever it might be, will rarely be
       encountered.  But there are cases where a "NUL" should sort before this control, but
       doesn't.  If two strings do collate identically, the one containing the "NUL" will sort to
       earlier.  Prior to 5.26, there were more bugs.

   Multi-threaded
       XS code or C-language libraries called from it that use the system setlocale(3) function
       (except on Windows) likely will not work from a multi-threaded application without
       changes.  See "Locale-aware XS code" in perlxs.

       An XS module that is locale-dependent could have been written under the assumption that it
       will never be called in a multi-threaded environment, and so uses other non-locale
       constructs that aren't multi-thread-safe.  See "Thread-aware system interfaces" in perlxs.

       POSIX does not define a way to get the name of the current per-thread locale.  Some
       systems, such as Darwin and NetBSD do implement a function, querylocale(3) to do this.  On
       non-Windows systems without it, such as Linux, there are some additional caveats:

       •   An embedded perl needs to be started up while the global locale is in effect.  See
           "Using embedded Perl with POSIX locales" in perlembed.

       •   It becomes more important for perl to know about all the possible locale categories on
           the platform, even if they aren't apparently used in your program.  Perl knows all of
           the Linux ones.  If your platform has others, you can send email to
           <mailto:perlbug@perl.org> for inclusion of it in the next release.  In the meantime,
           it is possible to edit the Perl source to teach it about the category, and then
           recompile.  Search for instances of, say, "LC_PAPER" in the source, and use that as a
           template to add the omitted one.

       •   It is possible, though hard to do, to call "POSIX::setlocale" with a locale that it
           doesn't recognize as syntactically legal, but actually is legal on that system.  This
           should happen only with embedded perls, or if you hand-craft a locale name yourself.

   Broken systems
       In certain systems, the operating system's locale support is broken and cannot be fixed or
       used by Perl.  Such deficiencies can and will result in mysterious hangs and/or Perl core
       dumps when "use locale" is in effect.  When confronted with such a system, please report
       in excruciating detail to <perlbug@perl.org>, and also contact your vendor: bug fixes may
       exist for these problems in your operating system.  Sometimes such bug fixes are called an
       operating system upgrade.  If you have the source for Perl, include in the perlbug email
       the output of the test described above in "Testing for broken locales".

SEE ALSO

       I18N::Langinfo, perluniintro, perlunicode, open, "localeconv" in POSIX, "setlocale" in
       POSIX, "strcoll" in POSIX, "strftime" in POSIX, "strtod" in POSIX, "strxfrm" in POSIX.

       For special considerations when Perl is embedded in a C program, see "Using embedded Perl
       with POSIX locales" in perlembed.

HISTORY

       Jarkko Hietaniemi's original perli18n.pod heavily hacked by Dominic Dunlop, assisted by
       the perl5-porters.  Prose worked over a bit by Tom Christiansen, and now maintained by
       Perl 5 porters.