NAME

       locale - Perl pragma to use or avoid POSIX locales for built-in operations

SYNOPSIS

           @x = sort @y;       # Unicode sorting order
           {
               use locale;
               @x = sort @y;   # Locale-defined sorting order
           }
           @x = sort @y;       # Unicode sorting order again

DESCRIPTION

       This pragma tells the compiler to enable (or disable) the use of POSIX locales for built-
       in operations (for example, LC_CTYPE for regular expressions, LC_COLLATE for string
       comparison, and LC_NUMERIC for number formatting).  Each "use locale" or "no locale"
       affects statements to the end of the enclosing BLOCK.

       Starting in Perl 5.16, a hybrid mode for this pragma is available,

           use locale ':not_characters';

       which enables only the portions of locales that don't affect the character set (that is,
       all except LC_COLLATE and LC_CTYPE).  This is useful when mixing Unicode and locales,
       including UTF-8 locales.

           use locale ':not_characters';
           use open ":locale";           # Convert I/O to/from Unicode
           use POSIX qw(locale_h);       # Import the LC_ALL constant
           setlocale(LC_ALL, "");        # Required for the next statement
                                         # to take effect
           printf "%.2f\n", 12345.67'    # Locale-defined formatting
           @x = sort @y;                 # Unicode-defined sorting order.
                                         # (Note that you will get better
                                         # results using Unicode::Collate.)

       See perllocale for more detailed information on how Perl supports locales.

NOTE

       If your system does not support locales, then loading this module will cause the program
       to die with a message:

           "Your vendor does not support locales, you cannot use the locale
           module."