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, vary from system to system. Some systems
-provide only a few, hardwired, locales, and do not allow more to be
+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
for the category is not changed, and the function returns I<undef>.
For further information about the categories, consult L<setlocale(3)>.
+
+=head2 Finding locales
+
For the locales available in your system, also consult L<setlocale(3)>
and see whether it leads you to the list of the available locales
(search for the I<SEE ALSO> section). If that fails, try the following
english.iso88591 german.iso88591 russian.iso88595
Sadly, even though the calling interface for setlocale() has been
-standardized, the names of the locales and the directories where
-the configuration is, have not. The basic form of the name is
-I<language_country/territory>B<.>I<codeset>, but the
-latter parts are not always present.
+standardized, the names of the locales and the directories where the
+configuration is, have not. The basic form of the name is
+I<language_country/territory>B<.>I<codeset>, but the latter parts
+after the I<language> are not always present. The I<language> and the
+I<country> are usually from the standards B<ISO 3166> and B<ISO 639>,
+respectively, the two-letter abbreviations for the countries and the
+languages of the world. The I<codeset> part often mentions some B<ISO
+8859> character set, the Latin codesets. For example the C<ISO
+8859-1> is the so-called "Western codeset" that can be used to encode
+most of the Western European languages. Again, sadly, as you can see,
+there are several ways to write even the name of that one standard.
Two special locales are worth particular mention: "C" and "POSIX".
Currently these are effectively the same locale: the difference is
POSIX-conformant), so use "C" when you need explicitly to specify this
default locale.
+=head2 LOCALE PROBLEMS
+
+You may meet 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 were that LC_ALL equals "En_US"
+and LANG exists but has no value. Perl tried to believe you but it
+could not. Instead Perl gave up and fell back to the "C" locale, the
+default locale that is supposed to work no matter what. This usually
+means either or both of the two problems: either your locale settings
+were wrong, they talk of locales your system has never heard of, or
+that the locale installation in your system has problems, for example
+some system files are broken or missing. For the problems there are
+quick and temporary fixes and more thorough and lasting fixes.
+
+=head2 Temporarily fixing locale problems
+
+The two quickest fixes are either to make Perl be 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 a non-zero value, for example
+"1". 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 works funny.
+
+Perl can be run under the "C" locale by setting the environment
+variable LC_ALL to "C". This method is perhaps a bit more civilised
+than the PERL_BADLANG one but please note that setting the LC_ALL (or
+the other locale variables) may affect also other programs, not just
+Perl. Especially external programs run from within Perl will see
+these changes. If you make the new settings permanent (read on), all
+the programs you run will see the changes. See L<ENVIRONMENT> for for
+the full list of all the environment variables and L<USING LOCALES>
+for their effects in Perl. The effects in other programs are quite
+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 first try out changing these variables temporarily and if the
+new settings seem to help then put the settings into the startup files
+of your environment. Please consult your local documentation for the
+exact details but very shortly for UNIXish systems: in Bourneish
+shells (sh, ksh, bash, zsh) for example
+
+ LC_ALL=en_US.ISO8859-1
+ export LC_ALL
+
+We assume here that we saw with the above discussed commands the
+locale "en_US.ISO8859-1" and 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
+
+If you do not know what shell you have, please consult your local
+helpdesk or the equivalent.
+
+=head2 Permanently fixing locale problems
+
+Then the slower but better fixes: the misconfiguration of your own
+environment variables you may be able to fix yourself; 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 L<Finding locales>. That
+tells how you can find which locales really are supported and more
+importantly, installed, in your system. In our example error message
+the environment variables affecting the locale are listed in the order
+of decreasing importance and unset variables do not matter, therefore
+in the above error message the LC_ALL being "En_US" must have been the
+bad choice. Always try fixing first the locale settings listed first.
+
+Second, if you see with the listed commands something B<exactly> (for
+example prefix matches do not count and case usually matters) 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 skip forward to L<Fixing the system locale
+configuration>.
+
+=head2 Permantently fixing your locale configuration
+
+This is the case when for example you see
+
+ 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 is not
+the same thing. In this case you might try running under a locale
+that you could list and somehow matches with what you tried. The
+rules for matching locale names are a bit vague because
+standardisation is weak in this area. See again the L<Finding
+locales> about the general rules.
+
+=head2 Permanently fixing the system locale configuration
+
+Please contact your system administrator and tell her the exact error
+message you get and ask her to read this same documentation you are
+now reading. She should be able to check whether there is something
+wrong with the locale configuration of the system. The L<Finding
+locales> section is unfortunately a bit vague about the exact commands
+and places because these things are not that standardised.
+
=head2 The localeconv function
The POSIX::localeconv() function allows you to get particulars of the
setting, characters like 'E<aelig>', 'E<eth>', 'E<szlig>', and
'E<oslash>' may be understood as C<\w> characters.
-The C<LC_CTYPE> locale also provides the map used in translating
+The C<LC_CTYPE> locale also provides the map used in transliterating
characters between lower and uppercase. This affects the case-mapping
functions - lc(), lcfirst, uc() and ucfirst(); case-mapping
interpolation with C<\l>, C<\L>, C<\u> or <\U> in double-quoted strings
Jarkko Hietaniemi's original F<perli18n.pod> heavily hacked by Dominic
Dunlop, assisted by the perl5-porters.
-Last update: Wed Jan 22 11:04:58 EST 1997
+Last update: Mon Nov 17 22:48:48 EET 1997
projects / p5sagit/p5-mst-13.2.git / blobdiff