Locales [was: Re: Rationale for aligning data on even bytes in a Unix shell file?]

Bonita Montero <Bonita.Montero@gmail.com> writes:

UTF-8 has a locale, the chars between 128 and 255 have the locale Latin 1.

Since, as far as i can tell, no-one else has yet noted this:

The 'locale' includes the part _before_ the '.'. In the output you
shared, the locale is set to "C", the C/POSIX locale, using the UTF-8
'codeset' (i.e. encoding).

In my own case, my locale is en_AU[.UTF-8], the locale for the
English language in Australia:

  $ locale
  LANG=en_AU.UTF-8
  LC_CTYPE="en_AU.UTF-8"
  LC_NUMERIC="en_AU.UTF-8"
  LC_TIME=en_AU.UTF-8
  ...

Informally, when people refer to the 'locale', they're usually talking
about the part before the '.', not the encoding, e.g. "pl_PL" or "es_EH".

The glibc manual has a section that goes into the details:

Most locale names follow XPG syntax and consist of up to four parts:
>
language[_territory[.codeset]][@modifier]

-- https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Locale-Names.html


Alexis.