Provided by: libintl-perl_1.23-1build1_all 
NAME
Locale::Util - Portable l10n and i10n functions
SYNOPSIS
use Locale::Util;
my @linguas = parse_http_accept_language $ENV{HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE};
my @charsets = parse_http_accept_charset $ENV{HTTP_ACCEPT_CHARSET};
# Trie to set the locale to Brasilian Portuguese in UTF-8.
my $set_locale = set_locale LC_ALL, 'pt', 'BR', 'utf-8';
set_locale_cache $last_cache;
my $cache = get_locale_cache;
web_set_locale ($ENV{HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE}, $ENV_ACCEPT_CHARSET);
web_set_locale (['fr-BE', 'fr', 'it'], ['cp1252', 'utf-8']);
DESCRIPTION
This module provides portable functions dealing with localization (l10n) and
internationalization(i10n). It doesn't export anything by default, you have to specify
each function you need in the import list, or use the fully qualified name.
The functions here have a focus on web development, although they are general enough to
have them in the Locale:: namespace.
This module is considered alpha code. The interface is not stable. Please contact the
author if you want to use it in production code.
This module was introduced in libintl-perl 1.17.
FUNCTIONS
parse_http_accept_language STRING
Parses a string as passed in the HTTP header "Accept-Language". It returns a list of
tokens sorted by the quality value, see RFC 2616 for details.
Example:
parse_http_accept ("fr-fr, fr; q=0.7, de; q=0.3");
This means: Give me French for France with a quality value of 1.0 (the maximum).
Otherwise I will take any other French version (quality 0.7), German has a quality of
0.3 for me.
The function will return a list of tokens in the order of their quality values, in
this case "fr-fr", "fr" and "de".
The function is more forgiving than RFC 2616. It accepts quality values greater than
1.0 and with more than 3 decimal places. It also accepts languages and country names
with more than 8 characters. The language "*" is translated into "C".
parse_http_accept_charset STRING
Parses a string as passed in the HTTP header "Accept-Charset". It returns a list of
tokens sorted by the quality value, see RFC 2616 for details.
The special character set "*" (means all character sets) will be translated to the
undefined value.
set_locale CATEGORY, LANGUAGE[, COUNTRY, CHARSET]
Tries to set the user locale by means of POSIX::setlocale(). The latter function has
the disadvantage, that its second argument (the locale description string) is
completely non-standard and system-dependent. This function tries its best at
guessing the system's notion of a locale dientifier, with the arguments supplied:
CATEGORY
An integer argument for a valid locale category. These are the LC_* constants
(LC_ALL, LC_CTIME, LC_COLLATE, ...) defined in both Locale::Messages(3pm) and
POSIX(3pm).
LANGUAGE
A 2-letter language identifier as per ISO 639. Case doesn't matter, but an
unchanged version (ie. not lower-cased) of the language you provided will
always be tried to.
COUNTRY A 2-letter language identifier as per ISO 639. Case doesn't matter, but an
unchanged version (ie. not lower-cased) of the language you provided will
always be tried to.
This parameter is optional. If it is not defined, the function will try to
guess an appropriate country, otherwise leave it to the operating system.
CHARSET A valid charset name. Valid means valid! The charset "utf8" is not valid (it
is "utf-8"). Charset names that are accepted by the guessing algorithms in
Encode(3pm) are also not necessarily valid.
If the parameter is undefined, it is ignored. It is always ignored under
Windows.
The function tries to approach the desired locale in loops, refining it on every
success. It will first try to set the language (for any country), then try to select
the correct language, and finally try to select the correct charset.
The return value is false in case of failure, or the return value of the underlying
POSIX::setlocale() call in case of success.
In array context, the function returns the country name that was passed in the
successful call to POSIX::setlocale(). If this string is equal to the country name
you passed as an argument, you can be reasonably sure that the settings for this
country are really used. If it is not equal, the function has taken a guess at the
country (it has a list of "default" countries for each language). It seems that under
Windows, POSIX::setlocale() also succeeds, if you pass a country name that is actually
not supported. Therefore, the information is not completely reliable.
Please note that this function is intended for server processes (especially web
applications) that need to switch in a portable way to a certain locale. It is not
the recommended way to set the program locale for a regular application. In a regular
application you should do the following:
use POSIX qw (setlocale LC_ALL);
setlocale LC_ALL, '';
The empty string as the second argument means, that the system should switch to the
user's default locale.
get_locale_cache
The function set_locale() is potentially expansive, especially when it fails, because
it can try a lot of different combinations, and the system may have to load a lot of
locale definitions from its internal database.
In order to speed up things, results are internally cached in a hash, keys are the
languages, subkeys countries, subsubkeys the charsets. You can get a reference to
this hash with get_locale_cache().
The function cannot fail.
set_locale_cache HASH
Sets the internal cache. You can either pass a hash or a hash reference. The
function will use this as its cache, discarding its old cache. This allows you to
keep the hash persistent.
The function cannot fail.
web_set_locale (ACCEPT_LANGUAGE, ACCEPT_CHARSET, CATEGORY, AVAILABLE)
Try to change the locale to the settings described by ACCEPT_LANGUAGE and
ACCEPT_CHARSET. For each argument you can either pass a string as in the
corresponding http header, or a reference to an array of language resp. charset
identifiers.
Currently only the first charset passed is used as an argument. You are strongly
encouraged to pass a hard-coded value here, so that you have control about your
output.
The argument CATEGORY specifies the category (one of the LC_* constants as defined in
Locale::Messages(3pm) or in POSIX(3pm)). The category defaults to LC_ALL.
You can pass an optional reference to a list of locales in XPG4 format that are
available in your application. This is useful if you know which languages are
supported by your application. In fact, only the language part of the values in the
list are considered (for example for "en_US", only "en" is used). The country or
other parts are ignored.
The function returns the return value of the underlying set_locale() call, or false on
failure.
The function returns false on failure. On success it returns the return value of the
underlying set_locale() call. This value can be used directly in subsequent calls to
POSIX::setlocale(). In array context, it additionally returns the identifiers for the
language, the country, and the charset actually used.
BUGS
The function set_locale() probably fails to guess the correct locale identifier on a lot
of systems. If you have found such a case, please submit it as a bug report.
The bug tracking system for this packags is at
http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/Bugs.html?libintl-perl
Please note that this module is considered alpha code, and the interface is not stable.
Please contact the author, if you want to use it in production code.
AUTHOR
Copyright (C) 2002-2013, Guido Flohr <guido@imperia.net>, all rights reserved. See the
source code for details.
This software is contributed to the Perl community by Imperia (<http://www.imperia.net/>).
SEE ALSO
POSIX(3pm), perl(1)
POD ERRORS
Hey! The above document had some coding errors, which are explained below:
Around line 1213:
=cut found outside a pod block. Skipping to next block.