Re: Patch for ASN.1 compressed integer in pack/unpack

[p5sagit/p5-mst-13.2.git] / pod / perli18n.pod

=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
naive 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 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.

In runtime you can switch locales using the POSIX::setlocale().

	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 setlocale() is called the category and the
second argument the locale. The category tells in what area of data
processing we want to apply language-specific rules, the locale tells
in what language-country/territory-codeset. 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
	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.

=head2 CHARACTER TYPES

Starting from Perl version 5.002 perl has obeyed the 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. Depending on your locale settings,
characters like C<F>, C<I>, C<_>, C<x>, can be understood
as C<\w> characters.

=head2 COLLATION

Starting from Perl version 5.003_06 perl has obeyed the LC_COLLATE
environment variable which controls application's notions on the
ordering (collation) of the characters. C<B> does in most Latin
alphabets follow the C<A> but where do the C<A> and C<D> 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
language-specific "locale" settings. This can happen if the locale
support in the operating system is lacking 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.