PERLLOCALE(1)

📦
version 5.42.3 · 22 versions
, in fedora 43, fedora 44

PERLLOCALE(1) 💖

Perl Programmers Reference Guide — perllocale — bestie, this is Perl locale handling (internationalization and localization) and we are going to get through it together, okay? grab a snack. 🍓

✨ NAME ✨

perllocale — Perl locale handling (internationalization and localization). That's the whole vibe. 💅

🌈 DESCRIPTION 🌈

okay so. In the beginning there was ASCII, the "American Standard Code for Information Interchange", and honestly? it works quite well for Americans with their English alphabet and dollar-denominated currency — as long as they don't need the cents "¢" symbol, because that is not in ASCII. 💀

But it doesn't work so well even for other English speakers, who may use different currencies, such as the pound sterling "£" (also not in ASCII, bestie, the symbol simply isn't there). And for many of the thousands of the world's other languages it's hopelessly inadequate. no cap.

So to address these deficiencies, the concept of locales was invented (formally the ISO C, XPG4, POSIX 1.c "locale system"). These allow for users to interface with their computer more according to their preferences. Applications were and are being written that use the locale mechanism. The process of making such an application take account of its users' preferences in these kinds of matters is called internationalization (often abbreviated as i18n), and telling such an application about a particular set of preferences is known as localization (often abbreviated as l10n). 🦋

Perl has been extended to support certain types of locales available in the locale system. This is controlled per application by using one pragma, one function call, and several environment variables. that's the whole toolkit, iconic.

Perl supports single-byte locales that are supersets of ASCII, such as the ISO 8859 ones, and one multi-byte-type locale, UTF-8 ones, described in the next paragraph. Perl doesn't support any other multi-byte locales, such as the ones for East Asian languages. sorry to the East Asian locales, it's not you it's the design 😭

Unfortunately, there are quite a few deficiencies with the design (and often, the implementations) of locales. Unicode was invented (see perlunitut for an introduction to that) in part to address these design deficiencies, and nowadays, there is a series of "UTF-8 locales", based on Unicode. These are locales whose character set is Unicode, encoded in UTF-8. Starting in v5.20, Perl fully supports UTF-8 locales, except for sorting and string comparisons like lt and ge. Starting in v5.26, Perl can handle these reasonably as well, depending on the platform's implementation. However, for earlier releases or for better control, use Unicode::Collate. 📚

There are actually two slightly different types of UTF-8 locales: one for Turkic languages and one for everything else. Starting in Perl v5.30, Perl detects UTF-8 Turkic locales by their behaviour, and seamlessly handles both types; previously only the non-Turkic one was supported. The name of the locale is ignored; if your system has a "tr_TR.UTF-8" locale and it doesn't behave like a Turkic locale, perl will treat it like a non-Turkic locale. perl is judging by vibes, not by labels, and honestly? respect.

Perl continues to support the old non UTF-8 locales as well. There are currently no UTF-8 locales for EBCDIC platforms.

The perl interpreter is a C language program. At least stub locale support is required by the C language specification. So any instance of perl automatically has this. Later, the POSIX standard added more capabilities beyond the ones required by C. Perl supports these on the platforms where they are available. And Unicode supports a database of more types of information than the basic locale systems have. This database is called "CLDR", the "Common Locale Data Repository", http://cldr.unicode.org/. There are various CPAN modules that provide access to this XML-encoded data, such as Locale::CLDR, CLDR::Number, and DateTime::Format::CLDR. 💖

🌍 WHAT IS A LOCALE 🌍

A locale is a set of data that describes various aspects of how various communities in the world categorize their world. These categories are broken down into the following types (some of which include a brief note here):

  • Category LC_NUMERIC: Numeric formatting This indicates how numbers should be formatted for human readability, for example the character used as the decimal point. 🔢
  • Category LC_MONETARY: Formatting of monetary amounts 💸
  • Category LC_TIME: Date/Time formatting 🕰️
  • Category LC_COLLATE: Collation This indicates the ordering of letters for comparison and sorting. In Latin alphabets, for example, b, generally follows a. 🔤
  • Category LC_CTYPE: Character Types This indicates, for example if a character is an uppercase letter. 🔠
  • Category LC_MESSAGES: Error and other messages This is a POSIX extension beyond the basic C language required categories. On Windows and other non-POSIX platforms, perl uses workarounds to simulate it. 💬
  • Category LC_TIME: Date/Time formatting 🕰️
  • Category LC_ALL This is not an actual category, but a convenience short-hand to refer to all of the actual ones. ✨
  • Other categories Some platforms have other categories, dealing with such things as measurement units and paper sizes. None of these are used directly by Perl, but outside operations that Perl interacts with may use these. See "Not within the scope of use locale" below. 📏

More details on the categories used by Perl are given below in "LOCALE CATEGORIES".

Together, these categories go a long way towards being able to customize a single program to run in many different locations. And adding Unicode CLDR goes further. But there are deficiencies, so keep reading. 👀

🎀 PREPARING TO USE LOCALES 🎀

Perl itself (outside the POSIX module) will not use locales unless specifically requested to (but again note that Perl may interact with code that does use them). Even if there is such a request, all of the following must be true for it to work properly:

  • Perl must believe that the locale system is supported. If it does, perl -V:d_setlocale will say that the value for d_setlocale is define. ✅
  • Definitions for the locales that you use must be installed. All platforms that perl runs on are required to support at least one locale, named C, which is essentially ASCII, and typical American preferences.

Most platforms allow for additional locales, but these must be specifically installed. You, or your system administrator, must make sure that any locales you want are installed. The available locales, the location in which they are kept, and the manner in which they are installed all vary from system to system. Some systems 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 provide canned locales that are not delivered with your operating system.) Read your system documentation for further illumination. 📖

If you want a Perl application to process and present your data according to a particular locale, the application code should include the use locale pragma (see "The use locale pragma") where appropriate, and at least one of the following must be true:

  1. The locale-determining environment variables (see "ENVIRONMENT") must be correctly set up at the time the application is started, either by yourself or by whomever set up your system account; or
  2. The application must set its own locale using the method described in "The setlocale function".

💜 USING LOCALES 💜

🦋 The use locale pragma 🦋

By default, Perl itself (outside the POSIX module) ignores the current locale. The use locale pragma tells Perl to use the current locale for some operations. Starting in v5.16, there are optional parameters to this pragma, described below, which restrict which operations are affected by it. 🎛️

Starting in Perl 5.28, this pragma may be used in multi-threaded applications on systems that have thread-safe locale ability. Some caveats apply, see "Multi-threaded" below. On systems without this capability, or in earlier Perls, do NOT use this pragma in scripts that have multiple threads active. The locale in these cases is not local to a single thread. Another thread may change the locale at any time, which could cause at a minimum that a given thread is operating in a locale it isn't expecting to be in. On some platforms, segfaults can also occur. The locale change need not be explicit; some operations cause perl itself to change the locale. You are vulnerable simply by having done a use locale. 😭 not me reading this and sweating

The current locale is set at execution time by setlocale() described below. If that function hasn't yet been called in the course of the program's execution, the current locale is that which was determined by the "ENVIRONMENT" in effect at the start of the program. If there is no valid environment, the current locale is whatever the system default has been set to. On POSIX systems, it is likely, but not necessarily, the C locale. On Windows, the default is set via the computer's Control Panel->Regional and Language Options (or its current equivalent). 🪟

The operations that are affected by locale are:

🌸 Not within the scope of use locale 🌸

Only certain operations (all originating outside Perl) should be affected, as follows:

  • The current locale is used when going outside of Perl with operations like system() or qx//, if those operations are locale-sensitive. 🚪
  • Also Perl gives access to various C library functions through the POSIX module. Some of those functions are always affected by the current locale. For example, POSIX::strftime() uses LC_TIME; POSIX::strtod() uses LC_NUMERIC; POSIX::strcoll() and POSIX::strxfrm() use LC_COLLATE. All such functions will behave according to the current underlying locale, even if that locale isn't exposed to Perl space. 🌐

This applies as well to I18N::Langinfo.

  • XS modules for all categories but LC_NUMERIC get the underlying locale, and hence any C library functions they call will use that underlying locale. For more discussion, see "Dealing with locales" in perlclib. 🧩
Note that all C programs (including the perl interpreter, which is written in C) always have an underlying locale. That locale is the C locale unless changed by a call to setlocale(). When Perl starts up, it changes the underlying locale to the one which is indicated by the "ENVIRONMENT". When using the POSIX module or writing XS code, it is important to keep in mind that the underlying locale may be something other than C, even if the program hasn't explicitly changed it. 👑

…and that's where part 1 leaves us, bestie — more coming, don't go anywhere 💅

💫 Lingering effects of "use locale" 💫

okay so this is the part that gets a lil spicy 🔥 — certain Perl operations get set up while you're inside a use locale scope and then just... keep that energy even after the scope ends. no cap, they do not let go. These include:

  • The output format of a write() is determined by an earlier format declaration ("format" in perlfunc), so whether or not the output is affected by locale is determined by if the format() is within the scope of a "use locale", not whether the write() is.
  • Regular expression patterns can be compiled using qr// with actual matching deferred to later. Again, it is whether or not the compilation was done within the scope of "use locale" that determines the match behavior, not if the matches are done within such a scope or not.

🎀 Under "use locale"; 🎀

bestie, here's everything that's lowkey living under the locale banner when it's on:

  • All the above operations
  • Format declarations ("format" in perlfunc) and hence any subsequent write()s use "LC_NUMERIC".
  • stringification and output use "LC_NUMERIC". These include the results of print(), printf(), say(), and sprintf().
  • The comparison operators ("lt", "le", "cmp", "ge", and "gt") use "LC_COLLATE". sort() is also affected if used without an explicit comparison function, because it uses cmp by default.
Note: "eq" and "ne" are unaffected by locale: they always perform a char-by-char comparison of their scalar operands. What's more, if "cmp" finds that its operands are equal according to the collation sequence specified by the current locale, it goes on to perform a char-by-char comparison, and only returns 0 (equal) if the operands are char-for-char identical. If you really want to know whether two strings--which "eq" and "cmp" may consider different--are equal as far as collation in the locale is concerned, see the discussion in "Category "LC_COLLATE": Collation".
  • Regular expressions and case-modification functions (uc(), lc(), ucfirst(), and lcfirst()) use "LC_CTYPE"
  • The variables $! (and its synonyms $ERRNO and $OS_ERROR) and $^E (and its synonym $EXTENDED_OS_ERROR) when used as strings use "LC_MESSAGES" On platforms that lack this category "LC_CTYPE" is used instead.

The default behavior is restored with the "no locale" pragma, or upon reaching the end of the block enclosing "use locale". Note that "use locale" calls may be nested, and that what is in effect within an inner scope will revert to the outer scope's rules at the end of the inner scope. it's giving nesting dolls 🪆

The string result of any operation that uses locale information is tainted (if your perl supports taint checking), as it is possible for a locale to be untrustworthy. See "SECURITY". yeah girl, it's sus by default and perl knows it 🙈

Starting in Perl v5.16 in a very limited way, and more generally in v5.22, you can restrict which category or categories are enabled by this particular instance of the pragma by adding parameters to it. (This capability was to enable you to write code to work around deficiencies in perl's locale handling, which have since been corrected, so it is unlikely that new code will need to use it.) so like... it's an antique bestie, admire it, don't date it 💅

For example,

 use locale qw(:ctype :numeric);

enables locale awareness within its scope of only those operations (listed above) that are affected by "LC_CTYPE" and "LC_NUMERIC".

The possible categories are: ":collate", ":ctype", ":messages", ":monetary", ":numeric", ":time", and the pseudo category ":characters" (described below).

Thus you can say

 use locale ':messages';

and only "$!" and "$^E" will be locale aware. Everything else is unaffected. slay, minimal effort, maximum boundaries ✨

Since Perl doesn't currently do anything with the "LC_MONETARY" category, specifying ":monetary" does effectively nothing. Some systems have other categories, such as "LC_PAPER", but the perl core doesn't do anything with them, and there is no way to specify them in this pragma's arguments. so yes you can type it, no it won't do a thing 💀

You can also easily say to use all categories but one, by either, for example,

 use locale ':!ctype';
 use locale ':not_ctype';

both of which mean to enable locale awareness of all categories but "LC_CTYPE". Only one category argument may be specified in a "use locale" if it is of the negated form. one (1) negated arg, that's the rule 🚨

Prior to v5.22 only one form of the pragma with arguments is available:

 use locale ':not_characters';

(and you have to say "not_"; you can't use the bang "!" form). This pseudo category is a shorthand for specifying both ":collate" and ":ctype". Hence, in the negated form, it is nearly the same thing as saying

 use locale qw(:messages :monetary :numeric :time);

We use the term "nearly", because ":not_characters" also turns on "use feature 'unicode_strings'" within its scope. This form is less useful in v5.20 and later, and is described fully in "Unicode and UTF-8", but briefly, it tells Perl to not use the character portions of the locale definition, that is the "LC_CTYPE" and "LC_COLLATE" categories. Instead it will use the native character set (extended by Unicode). When using this parameter, you are responsible for getting the external character set translated into the native/Unicode one (which it already will be if it is one of the increasingly popular UTF-8 locales). There are convenient ways of doing this, as described in "Unicode and UTF-8". your charset, your problem bestie 🫶

🧚 The setlocale function 🧚

WARNING! Prior to Perl 5.28 or on a system that does not support thread-safe locale operations, do NOT use this function in a thread. The locale will change in all other threads at the same time, and should your thread get paused by the operating system, and another started, that thread will not have the locale it is expecting. On some platforms, there can be a race leading to segfaults if two threads call this function nearly simultaneously. This warning does not apply on unthreaded builds, or on perls where "${^SAFE_LOCALES}" exists and is non-zero; namely Perl 5.28 and later unthreaded or compiled to be locale-thread-safe. On z/OS systems, this function becomes a no-op once any thread is started. Thus, on that system, you can set up the locale before creating any threads, and that locale will be the one in effect for the entire program.

Otherwise, you can switch locales as often as you wish at run time with the POSIX::setlocale() function:

        # Import locale-handling tool set from POSIX module.
        # This example uses: setlocale -- the function call
        #                    LC_CTYPE -- explained below
        # (Showing the testing for success/failure of operations is
        # omitted in these examples to avoid distracting from the main
        # point)

        use POSIX qw(locale_h);
        use locale;
        my $old_locale;

        # query and save the old locale
        $old_locale = setlocale(LC_CTYPE);

        setlocale(LC_CTYPE, "fr_CA.ISO8859-1");
        # LC_CTYPE now in locale "French, Canada, codeset ISO 8859-1"

        setlocale(LC_CTYPE, "");
        # LC_CTYPE now reset to the default defined by the
        # LC_ALL/LC_CTYPE/LANG environment variables, or to the system
        # default.  See below for documentation.

        # restore the old locale
        setlocale(LC_CTYPE, $old_locale);

The first argument of setlocale() gives the category, the second the locale. The category tells in what aspect of data processing you want to apply locale-specific rules. Category names are discussed in "LOCALE CATEGORIES" and "ENVIRONMENT". The locale is the name of a collection of customization information corresponding to a particular combination of language, country or territory, and codeset. Read on for hints on the naming of locales: not all systems name locales as in the example. 🦋

If no second argument is provided and the category is something other than "LC_ALL", the function returns a string naming the current locale for the category. You can use this value as the second argument in a subsequent call to setlocale(), but on some platforms the string is opaque, not something that most people would be able to decipher as to what locale it means. like a lil mystery box, iykyk 🎁

If no second argument is provided and the category is "LC_ALL", the result is implementation-dependent. It may be a string of concatenated locale names (separator also implementation-dependent) or a single locale name. Please consult your setlocale(3) man page for details.

If a second argument is given and it corresponds to a valid locale, the locale for the category is set to that value, and the function returns the now-current locale value. You can then use this in yet another call to setlocale(). (In some implementations, the return value may sometimes differ from the value you gave as the second argument--think of it as an alias for the value you gave.) not me getting a different string back than i sent in 💀 it's an alias bestie, it's fine

As the example shows, if the second argument is an empty string, the category's locale is returned to the default specified by the corresponding environment variables. Generally, this results in a return to the default that was in force when Perl started up: changes to the environment made by the application after startup may or may not be noticed, depending on your system's C library.

Note that when a form of "use locale" that doesn't include all categories is specified, Perl ignores the excluded categories.

If setlocale() fails for some reason (for example, an attempt to set to a locale unknown to the system), the locale for the category is not changed, and the function returns "undef". no partial slay, it's all or nothing 😭

Starting in Perl 5.28, on multi-threaded perls compiled on systems that implement POSIX 2008 thread-safe locale operations, this function doesn't actually call the system "setlocale". Instead those thread-safe operations are used to emulate the "setlocale" function, but in a thread-safe manner.

You can force the thread-safe locale operations to always be used (if available) by recompiling perl with

 -Accflags='-DUSE_THREAD_SAFE_LOCALE'

added to your call to Configure.

For further information about the categories, consult setlocale(3).

🌈 Multi-threaded operation 🌈

Beginning in Perl 5.28, multi-threaded locale operation is supported on systems that implement either the POSIX 2008 or Windows-specific thread-safe locale operations. Many modern systems, such as various Unix variants do have this. Others, such as most *BSD-derived variants, including Darwin, claim to have it, but are buggy as of May 2024, so Perl avoids their use. claiming it and actually having it are two different things bestie 🙈

You can tell if using locales is safe on your system by looking at the read-only variable "${^SAFE_LOCALES}". The value is 1 if the perl is not threaded, or if it is using thread-safe locale operations. vibe check the variable, it never lies 👑

okay so thread-safe operations — here's the tea ☕: they're supported in Windows starting in Visual Studio 2005, in cygwin, in MingW compiled to use UCRT (the Universal C Run Time library), and in systems compatible with POSIX 2008. And ${^SAFE_LOCALES}? On threaded builds on platforms that Perl knows to have buggy implementations, it's gonna be 0. 🫠

heads up though, bestie — writing a multi-threaded application is not gonna be portable to a platform that lacks the native thread-safe locale support. On systems that do have it, you get this behavior automatically for threaded perls, no effort required, it's giving free gift 🎁. But if for some reason you don't want this capability (maybe the POSIX 2008 support turns out to be buggy on your system 😭), you can manually compile Perl to use the old non-thread-safe implementation by passing this argument to Configure:

-Accflags='-DNO_THREAD_SAFE_LOCALE'

Except on Windows, this will keep using certain of the POSIX 2008 functions in some situations. And if those are buggy too, you can pass this to Configure instead or additionally:

-Accflags='-DNO_POSIX_2008_LOCALE'

That'll also keep the code from using thread-safe locales. And ${^SAFE_LOCALES} will be 0 on systems that turn off the thread-safe operations. periodt 💅

Normally on unthreaded builds, Perl uses the traditional setlocale() to change the locale, and not the alternate POSIX 2008 thread-safe locale-changing functions. Want to force those on systems that have them? Just add this to Configure:

-Accflags='-DUSE_THREAD_SAFE_LOCALE'

The initial program starts up using the locale specified from the environment, exactly as currently described in "ENVIRONMENT". Then — and this is the cute part — all newly created threads start with LC_ALL set to C ✨. Each thread may use POSIX::setlocale() to query or switch its locale at any time, without affecting any other thread. And all locale-dependent operations automatically use their thread's locale. no cap 🧚

This should be completely transparent to any applications written entirely in Perl (minus a few rarely encountered caveats given in the "Multi-threaded" section 🙈). And for XS module writers, the info you want is in "Dealing with locales" in perlclib. 💜

Finding locales

For the locales available on your system, also go check setlocale(3) and see whether it leads you to the list of available locales (search for the SEE ALSO section 👀). If that flops, try these command lines:

locale -a

nlsinfo

ls /usr/lib/nls/loc

ls /usr/lib/locale

ls /usr/lib/nls

ls /usr/share/locale

and see whether they list something resembling these:

en_US.ISO8859-1     de_DE.ISO8859-1     ru_RU.ISO8859-5
en_US.iso88591      de_DE.iso88591      ru_RU.iso88595
en_US               de_DE               ru_RU
en                  de                  ru
english             german              russian
english.iso88591    german.iso88591     russian.iso88595
english.roman8                          russian.koi8r

Sadly 😭 even though the calling interface for setlocale() has been standardized, the names of locales and the directories where the configuration resides have not been. The basic form of the name is language[_territory[.codeset]][@modifier]. The language and country are usually from the standards ISO 3166 and ISO 639 — those are the two-letter abbreviations for the countries and the languages of the world, respectively. The codeset part often mentions some ISO 8859 character set, the Latin codesets. For example, ISO 8859-1 is the so-called "Western European codeset" that can be used to encode most Western European languages adequately. And again — there are several ways to write even the name of that one standard. lamentably. As for modifier? It's super individualized to the rest of the locale, naming some variant, like a different currency symbol than the locale would normally contain. 💸

Two special locales deserve a whole shoutout though: C and POSIX. Currently these are effectively the same locale — the difference is mainly that the first one is defined by the C standard, and the second by the POSIX standard. They define the default locale that every program starts in when there's no locale information in its environment. (The default default locale, if you will 😌.) Its language is (American) English, and its character codeset is ASCII or, rarely, a superset thereof (such as the DEC Multinational Character Set (DEC-MCS)).

Warning. The C locale delivered by some vendors may not actually exactly match what the C standard calls for. So beware 💀

NOTE: not all systems have the POSIX locale (not all systems are POSIX-conformant), so use C when you need to explicitly specify this default locale.

LOCALE PROBLEMS

You might hit this 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").

What this is saying: your locale settings had LC_ALL set to En_US, and LANG exists but has no value. Perl tried to believe you but could not 😔. So instead, Perl gave up and fell back to the C locale — the default locale that's supposed to work no matter what. (On Windows, it first tries falling back to the system default locale.) This usually means your locale settings were wrong, they mention locales your system has never heard of, or the locale installation on your system has problems (for example, some system files are broken or missing). There are quick and temporary fixes to these problems, and also more thorough and lasting fixes. Let's get into it 🫶

Testing for broken locales

If you're building Perl from source, the Perl test suite file lib/locale.t can be used to test the locales on your system. Setting the environment variable PERL_DEBUG_FULL_TEST to 1 will make it output detailed results. For example, on Linux, you could say

 PERL_DEBUG_FULL_TEST=1 ./perl -T -Ilib lib/locale.t > locale.log 2>&1

Besides many other tests, it'll test every locale it finds on your system to see if they conform to the POSIX standard. If any have errors, it'll include a summary near the end of the output of which locales passed all its tests, and which failed, and why. ✨

Temporarily fixing locale problems

The two quickest fixes are either to render Perl 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 0 or "". This method really just sweeps the problem under the carpet: you're telling Perl to shut up even when Perl sees that something is wrong 🙈. Do not be surprised if later something locale-dependent misbehaves.

Perl can be run under the C locale by setting the environment variable LC_ALL to C. This method is maybe a bit more civilized than the PERL_BADLANG approach, but setting LC_ALL (or other locale variables) may affect other programs as well, not just Perl. In particular, external programs run from within Perl will see these changes. If you make the new settings permanent (read on 👀), all programs you run see the changes. See "ENVIRONMENT" for the full list of relevant environment variables, and "USING LOCALES" for their effects in Perl. Effects in other programs are easily deducible. For example, the variable LC_COLLATE may well affect your sort program (or whatever the program that arranges "records" alphabetically on your system is called).

You can test out changing these variables temporarily, and if the new settings seem to help, put those settings into your shell startup files. Consult your local documentation for the exact details. For Bourne-like shells (sh, ksh, bash, zsh):

LC_ALL=en_US.ISO8859-1
export LC_ALL

This assumes that we saw the locale en_US.ISO8859-1 using the commands discussed above. We decided to try that instead of the above faulty locale En_US. 💅

And in Csh-ish shells (csh, tcsh)

setenv LC_ALL en_US.ISO8859-1

or if you have the env application you can do (in any shell)

env LC_ALL=en_US.ISO8859-1 perl ...

If you do not know what shell you have, consult your local helpdesk or the equivalent. 😭

Permanently fixing locale problems

The slower but superior fixes are for when you may be able to fix the misconfiguration of your own environment variables yourself. The mis(sing)configuration of the whole system's locales usually requires the help of your system administrator.

First, see earlier in this document about "Finding locales". That tells how to find which locales are really supported — and more importantly, installed — on your system. In our example error message, environment variables affecting the locale are listed in the order of decreasing importance (and unset variables do not matter). Therefore, having LC_ALL set to En_US must have been the bad choice, as shown by the error message. First try fixing locale settings listed first. 🌸

Second, if using the listed commands you see something exactly (prefix matches do not count, and case usually counts) like En_US without the quotes, then you should be okay, because you're using a locale name that should be installed and available on your system. In this case, see "Permanently fixing your system's locale configuration".

Permanently fixing your system's locale configuration

This is when you see something like:

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 isn't the same 👀. In this case, try running under a locale that you can list and which somehow matches what you tried. The rules for matching locale names are a bit vague, because standardization is weak in this area. See again the "Finding locales" about general rules.

Fixing system locale configuration

Contact a system administrator (preferably your own 😌) and report the exact error message you get, and ask them to read this same documentation you're now reading. They should be able to check whether there's something wrong with the locale configuration of the system. The "Finding locales" section is unfortunately a bit vague about the exact commands and places, because these things are not that standardized. 🦋

💅 The localeconv function 💅

okay bestie, so POSIX::localeconv() is your girl for getting the particulars of the locale-dependent numeric formatting info that the current underlying LC_NUMERIC and LC_MONETARY locales specify — and she does it whether or not you called her from inside the scope of use locale. ✨ (If all you want is the name of the current locale for one particular category, use POSIX::setlocale() with a single parameter — see "The setlocale function".)

        use POSIX qw(locale_h);

        # Get a reference to a hash of locale-dependent info
        $locale_values = localeconv();

        # Output sorted list of the values
        for (sort keys %$locale_values) {
            printf "%-20s = %s\n", $_, $locale_values->{$_}
        }

localeconv() takes no arguments and hands back a reference to a hash. The keys of that hash are variable names for formatting, like decimal_point and thousands_sep. The values are the corresponding, er, values. 💖 See "localeconv" in POSIX for a longer example listing the categories an implementation might be expected to provide — some provide more, some fewer, it's giving ✨variety✨. You don't need an explicit use locale, because localeconv() always observes the current locale. Periodt.

Here's a simple-minded little example program that rewrites its command-line parameters as integers correctly formatted in the current locale:

    use POSIX qw(locale_h);

    # Get some of locale's numeric formatting parameters
    my ($thousands_sep, $grouping) =
            @{localeconv()}{'thousands_sep', 'grouping'};

    # Apply defaults if values are missing
    $thousands_sep = ',' unless $thousands_sep;

    # grouping and mon_grouping are packed lists
    # of small integers (characters) telling the
    # grouping (thousand_seps and mon_thousand_seps
    # being the group dividers) of numbers and
    # monetary quantities.  The integers' meanings:
    # 255 means no more grouping, 0 means repeat
    # the previous grouping, 1-254 means use that
    # as the current grouping.  Grouping goes from
    # right to left (low to high digits).  In the
    # below we cheat slightly by never using anything
    # else than the first grouping (whatever that is).
    if ($grouping) {
        @grouping = unpack("C*", $grouping);
    } else {
        @grouping = (3);
    }

    # Format command line params for current locale
    for (@ARGV) {
        $_ = int;    # Chop non-integer part
        1 while
        s/(\d)(\d{$grouping[0]}($|$thousands_sep))/$1$thousands_sep$2/;
        print "$_";
    }
    print "\n";
heads up 🫶 — if the platform doesn't have LC_NUMERIC and/or LC_MONETARY available or enabled, the corresponding elements of the hash will just be missing. gone. not there. so don't come for her.

🦋 I18N::Langinfo 🦋

Another interface for querying locale-dependent info is the I18N::Langinfo::langinfo() function. two queens, same job, we love to see it. 👑

The following example imports the langinfo() function itself plus three constants to use as arguments to langinfo(): a constant for the abbreviated first day of the week (the numbering starts from Sunday = 1) and two more constants for the affirmative and negative answers to a yes/no question in the current locale.

    use I18N::Langinfo qw(langinfo ABDAY_1 YESSTR NOSTR);

    my ($abday_1, $yesstr, $nostr)
                = map { langinfo } qw(ABDAY_1 YESSTR NOSTR);

    print "$abday_1? [$yesstr/$nostr] ";

In other words, in the C (or English) locale the above will probably print something like:

    Sun? [yes/no]

See I18N::Langinfo for more information. ✨

🌈 LOCALE CATEGORIES 🌈

The following subsections describe the basic locale categories. Beyond these, some combination categories let you manipulate more than one basic category at a time — see "ENVIRONMENT" for the whole discussion on those. 💜

🎀 Category LC_COLLATE: Collation: Text Comparisons and Sorting 🎀

In the scope of a use locale form that includes collation, Perl looks to the LC_COLLATE environment variable to determine the application's notions on collation (aka ordering) of characters. Like, b likely follows a in Latin alphabets, sure — but bestie, where do á and å belong?? 😭 And while color follows chocolate in English, what about in traditional Spanish? the drama of it all.

The following collations all make sense, and you may meet any of them if you use locale:

        A B C D E a b c d e
        A a B b C c D d E e
        a A b B c C d D e E
        a b c d e A B C D E

Here's a code snippet to tell you what word characters are in the current locale, in that locale's own order:

        use locale;
        print +(sort grep /\w/, map { chr } 0..255), "\n";

Now compare that with the characters you see and their order if you state explicitly that the locale should be ignored:

        no locale;
        print +(sort grep /\w/, map { chr } 0..255), "\n";

This machine-native collation — which is what you get unless use locale has appeared earlier in the same block — must be used for sorting raw binary data. The locale-dependent collation of the first example, on the other hand, is the useful one for natural text. 🌸

As noted in "USING LOCALES", cmp compares according to the current collation locale when use locale is in effect, but it falls back to a char-by-char comparison for strings that the locale says are equal. You can use POSIX::strcoll() if you don't want that fall-back:

        use POSIX qw(strcoll);
        $equal_in_locale =
            !strcoll("space and case ignored", "SpaceAndCaseIgnored");

$equal_in_locale will be true if the collation locale specifies a dictionary-like ordering that ignores space characters completely and which folds case. iconic behavior honestly. 💅

Perl uses the platform's C library collation functions strcoll() and strxfrm(). Which means you get whatever they give you — no cap. On some platforms, these functions work well on UTF-8 locales, giving a reasonable default collation for the code points that are important in that locale. (And if they aren't working well, the problem may only be that the locale definition itself is deficient, so it can be fixed by using a better definition file. Unicode's definitions — see "Freely available locale definitions" — provide reasonable UTF-8 locale collation definitions. 🦋) Starting in Perl v5.26, Perl's use of these functions has been made more seamless. This may be sufficient for your needs. For more control, and to make sure strings containing any code point (not just the ones important in the locale) collate properly, the Unicode::Collate module is suggested. 👑

In non-UTF-8 locales (hence single byte), code points above 0xFF are technically invalid. But if present, again starting in v5.26, they will collate to the same position as the highest valid code point does. This generally gives good results, but the collation order may be skewed if the valid code point gets special treatment when it forms particular sequences with other characters as defined by the locale. When two strings collate identically, the code point order is used as a tie breaker. ✨

If Perl detects that there are problems with the locale collation order, it reverts to using non-locale collation rules for that locale. she said "not today." 💀

If you have a single string that you want to check for "equality in locale" against several others, you might think you could gain a little efficiency by using POSIX::strxfrm() in conjunction with eq:

        use POSIX qw(strxfrm);
        $xfrm_string = strxfrm("Mixed-case string");
        print "locale collation ignores spaces\n"
            if $xfrm_string eq strxfrm("Mixed-casestring");
        print "locale collation ignores hyphens\n"
            if $xfrm_string eq strxfrm("Mixedcase string");
        print "locale collation ignores case\n"
            if $xfrm_string eq strxfrm("mixed-case string");

strxfrm() takes a string and maps it into a transformed string, for use in char-by-char comparisons against other transformed strings during collation. "Under the hood", locale-affected Perl comparison operators call strxfrm() for both operands, then do a char-by-char comparison of the transformed strings. By calling strxfrm() explicitly and using a non locale-affected comparison, the example attempts to save a couple of transformations. But in fact — and this is the plot twist bestie — it doesn't save anything: Perl magic (see "Magic Variables" in perlguts) creates the transformed version of a string the first time it's needed in a comparison, then keeps this version around in case it's needed again. An example rewritten the easy way with cmp runs just about as fast. It also copes with null characters embedded in strings; if you call strxfrm() directly, it treats the first null it finds as a terminator. And don't expect the transformed strings it produces to be portable across systems — or even from one revision of your operating system to the next. 😭 In short: don't call strxfrm() directly, let Perl do it for you. fr fr.

Note: use locale isn't shown in some of these examples because it isn't needed — strcoll() and strxfrm() are POSIX:: functions which use the standard system-supplied libc functions that always obey the current LC_COLLATE locale. iykyk 💖

🧚 Category LC_CTYPE: Character Types 🧚

In the scope of a use locale form that includes LC_CTYPE, Perl obeys the LC_CTYPE locale setting. This controls the application's notion of which characters are alphabetic, numeric, punctuation, etc. — the whole vibe check on characters. 🌈

This affects Perl's \w regular expression metanotation, which stands for alphanumeric characters, that is, alphabetic, numeric, and the platform's native underscore. (Consult perlre for more info about regular expressions.) Thanks to LC_CTYPE, depending on your locale setting, characters like æ, ð, ß, and ø may be understood as \w characters. slay. ✨ It also affects things like \s, \D, and the POSIX character classes, like [[:graph:]]. (See perlrecharclass for more info on all of these.)

The LC_CTYPE locale also provides the map used in transliterating characters between lower and uppercase. This affects the case-mapping functions — fc(), lc(), lcfirst(), uc(), and ucfirst(); case-mapping interpolation with \F, \l, \L, \u, or \U in double-quoted strings and s/// substitutions; and case-insensitive regular expression pattern matching using the i modifier. 🎀

Starting in v5.20, Perl supports UTF-8 locales for LC_CTYPE, but otherwise Perl only supports single-byte locales, like the ISO 8859 series. Bestie, this means wide character locales — think Asian languages — are not well-supported. Use of these locales may cause core dumps. 😭 If the platform has the capability for Perl to detect such a locale, starting in Perl v5.22, Perl will warn, default enabled, using the locale warning category, whenever such a locale is switched into. The UTF-8 locale support is actually a superset of POSIX locales, because it is really full Unicode behavior as if no LC_CTYPE locale were in effect at all (except for tainting; see SECURITY). POSIX locales, even UTF-8 ones, are lacking certain concepts in Unicode, such as the idea that changing the case of a character could expand to be more than one character. Perl in a UTF-8 locale, will give you that expansion. Prior to v5.20, Perl treated a UTF-8 locale on some platforms like an ISO 8859-1 one, with some restrictions, and on other platforms more like the C locale. For releases v5.16 and v5.18, "use locale 'not_characters" could be used as a workaround for this (see Unicode and UTF-8).

Note that there are quite a few things that are unaffected by the current locale. Any literal character is the native character for the given platform. Hence 'A' means the character at code point 65 on ASCII platforms, and 193 on EBCDIC. That may or may not be an 'A' in the current locale, if that locale even has an 'A'. Similarly, all the escape sequences for particular characters, "\n" for example, always mean the platform's native one. This means, for example, that "\N" in regular expressions (every character but new-line) works on the platform character set.

Starting in v5.22, Perl will by default warn when switching into a locale that redefines any ASCII printable character (plus "\t" and "\n") into a different class than expected. This is likely to happen on modern locales only on EBCDIC platforms, where, for example, a CCSID 0037 locale on a CCSID 1047 machine moves [, but it can happen on ASCII platforms with the ISO 646 and other 7-bit locales that are essentially obsolete. Things may still work, depending on what features of Perl are used by the program. For example, in the example from above where "|" becomes a "\w", and there are no regular expressions where this matters, the program may still work properly. The warning lists all the characters that it can determine could be adversely affected.

Note: A broken or malicious LC_CTYPE locale definition may result in clearly ineligible characters being considered to be alphanumeric by your application. For strict matching of (mundane) ASCII letters and digits — for example, in command strings — locale-aware applications should use "\w" with the /a regular expression modifier. See SECURITY.

✨ Category LC_NUMERIC: Numeric Formatting ✨

After a proper POSIX::setlocale() call, and within the scope of a use locale form that includes numerics, Perl obeys the LC_NUMERIC locale information, which controls an application's idea of how numbers should be formatted for human readability. In most implementations the only effect is to change the character used for the decimal point — perhaps from . to ,. The functions aren't aware of such niceties as thousands separation and so on. (See The localeconv function if you care about these things.)

        use POSIX qw(strtod setlocale LC_NUMERIC);
        use locale;

        setlocale LC_NUMERIC, "";

        $n = 5/2;   # Assign numeric 2.5 to $n

        $x = " $n"; # Locale-dependent conversion to string

        print "half five is $n\n";       # Locale-dependent output

        printf "half five is %g\n", $n;  # Locale-dependent output

        print "DECIMAL POINT IS COMMA\n"
                 if $n == (strtod("2,5"))[0]; # Locale-dependent conversion

See also I18N::Langinfo and RADIXCHAR.

💸 Category LC_MONETARY: Formatting of monetary amounts 💸

The C standard defines the LC_MONETARY category, but not a function that is affected by its contents. (Those with experience of standards committees will recognize that the working group decided to punt on the issue. POSIX 2001 added the strfmon() function to format currency amounts, but there is no official function to parse strings representing currency values.)

Perl essentially takes no notice of this category. On POSIX systems, you can call strfmon() from XS code to create formatted strings, and/or you can query the LC_MONETARY locale-specific values with The localeconv function and use the information that it returns in your application's own formatting of currency amounts. However, you may well find that the information, voluminous and complex though it may be, still does not quite meet your requirements: currency formatting is a hard nut to crack.

See also CRNCYSTR in I18N::Langinfo.

🕰️ Category LC_TIME: Representation of time 🕰️

Output produced by POSIX::strftime(), which builds a formatted human-readable date/time string, is affected by the current LC_TIME locale. Thus, in a French locale, the output produced by the %B format element (full month name) for the first month of the year would be janvier. Here's how to get a list of long month names in the current locale:

               use POSIX qw(strftime);
               for (0..11) {
                   $long_month_name[$_] =
                       strftime("%B", 0, 0, 0, 1, $_, 96);
               }

Note: use locale isn't needed in this example: strftime() is a POSIX:: function which uses the standard system-supplied libc function that always obeys the current LC_TIME locale.

See also I18N::Langinfo and ABDAY_1..ABDAY_7, DAY_1..DAY_7, ABMON_1..ABMON_12, and ABMON_1..ABMON_12.

There is also the libc strptime() function defined starting in POSIX 2001 (it's not in Windows) that parses formatted time strings. There is currently no pure perl access to this function, so you need to write XS code to use it.

💬 Category LC_MESSAGES: System messages 💬

This category is used by perl to create a string describing a system error number, such as what you would get by saying $! or $^E. On some systems and locales, the string will be in the language of the locale given by LC_MESSAGES. But not many systems have bothered to install such translations for all locales available on the system. If no translation is available for a given locale, the string will be in English. See Errno for information about portably using error codes.

The other categories mentioned so far are required to exist in any platform on which Perl can run. But this category is a POSIX extension, and Perl runs on platforms, Windows, for example, that don't have it. On such platforms the underlying language for the system errors will be whatever LC_CTYPE gives, or English.

This category in conjunction with I18N::Langinfo can be used to output yes/no in its locale's language, and to parse strings that contain yes or no in that language.

🦋 Other categories 🦋

Some platforms have additional categories. These are not used by Perl itself. I18N::Langinfo may be used to query them, yielding stub values on platforms where they don't exist. But again note that things Perl interacts with may use these, including extensions outside the standard Perl distribution, and by the operating system and its utilities.

💖 SECURITY 💖

okay so real talk bestie: the main discussion of Perl security issues can be found in perlsec, but a discussion of Perl's locale handling would be incomplete if it did not draw your attention to locale-dependent security issues. Locales--particularly on systems that allow unprivileged users to build their own locales--are untrustworthy. A malicious (or just plain broken) locale can make a locale-aware application give unexpected results. Here are a few possibilities:

  • Regular expression checks for safe file names or mail addresses using "\w" may be spoofed by an "LC_CTYPE" locale that claims that characters such as ">" and "|" are alphanumeric. 😭
  • String interpolation with case-mapping, as in, say, $dest = "C:\U$name.$ext", may produce dangerous results if a bogus "LC_CTYPE" case-mapping table is in effect. 💀
  • A sneaky "LC_COLLATE" locale could result in the names of students with "D" grades appearing ahead of those with "A"s. 🙈
  • An application that takes the trouble to use information in "LC_MONETARY" may format debits as if they were credits and vice versa if that locale has been subverted. Or it might make payments in US dollars instead of Hong Kong dollars. 💸
  • The date and day names in dates formatted by strftime() could be manipulated to advantage by a malicious user able to subvert the "LC_TIME" locale. ("Look--it says I wasn't in the building on Sunday.") 🕵️

Such dangers are not peculiar to the locale system: any aspect of an application's environment which may be modified maliciously presents similar challenges. Similarly, they are not specific to Perl: any programming language that allows you to write programs that take account of their environment exposes you to these issues.

Perl cannot protect you from all possibilities shown in the examples--there is no substitute for your own vigilance--but, when "use locale" is in effect, Perl uses the tainting mechanism (see perlsec) to mark string results that become locale-dependent, and which may be untrustworthy in consequence.

Note that it is possible to compile Perl without taint support, in which case all taint features silently do nothing.

Here is a summary of the tainting behavior of operators and functions that may be affected by the locale:

  • Comparison operators ("lt", "le", "ge", "gt" and "cmp"): Scalar true/false (or less/equal/greater) result is never tainted.
  • Case-mapping interpolation (with "\l", "\L", "\u", "\U", or "\F") The result string containing interpolated material is tainted if a "use locale" form that includes "LC_CTYPE" is in effect.
  • Matching operator ("m//"):
    • Scalar true/false result never tainted.
    • All subpatterns, either delivered as a list-context result or as $1 etc., are tainted if a "use locale" form that includes "LC_CTYPE" is in effect, and the subpattern regular expression contains a locale-dependent construct. These constructs include "\w" (to match an alphanumeric character), "\W" (non-alphanumeric character), "\b" and "\B" (word-boundary and non-boundary, which depend on what "\w" and "\W" match), "\s" (whitespace character), "\S" (non whitespace character), "\d" and "\D" (digits and non-digits), and the POSIX character classes, such as "[:alpha:]" (see "POSIX Character Classes" in perlrecharclass).
    • Tainting is also likely if the pattern is to be matched case-insensitively (via "/i"). The exception is if all the code points to be matched this way are above 255 and do not have folds under Unicode rules to below 256. Tainting is not done for these because Perl only uses Unicode rules for such code points, and those rules are the same no matter what the current locale.
    • The matched-pattern variables, $&, "$`" (pre-match), "$'" (post-match), and $+ (last match) also are tainted.
  • Substitution operator ("s///"): Has the same behavior as the match operator. Also, the left operand of "=~" becomes tainted when a "use locale" form that includes "LC_CTYPE" is in effect, if modified as a result of a substitution based on a regular expression match involving any of the things mentioned in the previous item, or of case-mapping, such as "\l", "\L","\u", "\U", or "\F".
  • Output formatting functions (printf() and write()): Results are never tainted because otherwise even output from print, for example print(1/7), should be tainted if "use locale" is in effect.
  • Case-mapping functions (lc(), lcfirst(), uc(), ucfirst()): Results are tainted if a "use locale" form that includes "LC_CTYPE" is in effect.
  • POSIX locale-dependent functions (localeconv(), strcoll(), strftime(), strxfrm()): Results are never tainted.

Three examples illustrate locale-dependent tainting. The first program, which ignores its locale, won't run: a value taken directly from the command line may not be used to name an output file when taint checks are enabled.

#/usr/local/bin/perl -T
# Run with taint checking

# Command line sanity check omitted...
$tainted_output_file = shift;

open(F, ">$tainted_output_file")
    or warn "Open of $tainted_output_file failed: $!\n";

The program can be made to run by "laundering" the tainted value through a regular expression: the second example--which still ignores locale information--runs, creating the file named on its command line if it can.

#/usr/local/bin/perl -T

$tainted_output_file = shift;
$tainted_output_file =~ m%[\w/]+%;
$untainted_output_file = $&;

open(F, ">$untainted_output_file")
    or warn "Open of $untainted_output_file failed: $!\n";

Compare this with a similar but locale-aware program:

#/usr/local/bin/perl -T

$tainted_output_file = shift;
use locale;
$tainted_output_file =~ m%[\w/]+%;
$localized_output_file = $&;

open(F, ">$localized_output_file")
    or warn "Open of $localized_output_file failed: $!\n";

This third program fails to run because $& is tainted: it is the result of a match involving "\w" while "use locale" is in effect.

🌍 ENVIRONMENT 🌍

Okay bestie, this is the part where the environment itself gets a say in what your Perl is doing. No cap. 🔥

The Perl-specific ones

  • PERL_SKIP_LOCALE_INIT — this lil cutie showed up in Perl v5.20, and if it's set (to literally any value, doesn't matter what), it tells Perl not to use the rest of the environment variables to initialize with. Instead, Perl just uses whatever the current locale settings already are. Super handy in embedded environments — check out "Using embedded Perl with POSIX locales" in perlembed for the whole tea. 💅
  • PERL_BADLANG — a string that can suppress Perl's warning about failed locale settings at startup. And why would locale settings fail, you ask? Well, it can happen if the locale support in your operating system is lacking (broken) in some way — or, iconic behaviour honestly, if you mistyped the name of a locale when you set up your environment. 🙈 If this environment variable is absent, or has a value other than "0" or "", Perl will complain about locale setting failures.
NOTE: PERL_BADLANG only gives you a way to hide the warning message. The message is telling you about some problem in your system's locale support, and you should genuinely investigate what the problem is. Don't just silence it and pretend, bestie. 😭

The following environment variables are not specific to Perl: They are part of the standardized (ISO C, XPG4, POSIX 1.c) setlocale() method for controlling an application's opinion on data. Windows is non-POSIX, but Perl arranges for the following to work as described anyway. If the locale given by an environment variable is not valid, Perl tries the next lower one in priority. If none are valid, on Windows, the system default locale is then tried. If all else fails, the "C" locale is used. If even that doesn't work, something is badly broken, but Perl tries to forge ahead with whatever the locale settings might be. 💀 Main character energy in the face of chaos, honestly.

  • LC_ALL — LC_ALL is the "override-all" locale environment variable. If set, it overrides all the rest of the locale environment variables. She's the queen bee 👑
  • LANGUAGE — NOTE: LANGUAGE is a GNU extension, it affects you only if you are using the GNU libc. This is the case if you are using e.g. Linux. If you are using "commercial" Unixes you are most probably not using GNU libc and you can ignore LANGUAGE. ✨

However, in the case you are using LANGUAGE: it affects the language of informational, warning, and error messages output by commands (in other words, it's like LC_MESSAGES) but it has higher priority than LC_ALL. Moreover, it's not a single value but instead a "path" (":"-separated list) of languages (not locales). See the GNU gettext library documentation for more information.

  • LC_CTYPE — In the absence of LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE chooses the character type locale. In the absence of both LC_ALL and LC_CTYPE, LANG chooses the character type locale.
  • LC_COLLATE — In the absence of LC_ALL, LC_COLLATE chooses the collation (sorting) locale. In the absence of both LC_ALL and LC_COLLATE, LANG chooses the collation locale.
  • LC_MONETARY — In the absence of LC_ALL, LC_MONETARY chooses the monetary formatting locale. In the absence of both LC_ALL and LC_MONETARY, LANG chooses the monetary formatting locale.
  • LC_NUMERIC — In the absence of LC_ALL, LC_NUMERIC chooses the numeric format locale. In the absence of both LC_ALL and LC_NUMERIC, LANG chooses the numeric format.
  • LC_TIME — In the absence of LC_ALL, LC_TIME chooses the date and time formatting locale. In the absence of both LC_ALL and LC_TIME, LANG chooses the date and time formatting locale.
  • LANG — LANG is the "catch-all" locale environment variable. If it is set, it is used as the last resort after the overall LC_ALL and the category-specific LC_foo. She's the backup friend who's always down. 🫶

✨ Examples ✨

The LC_NUMERIC controls the numeric output:

use locale;
use POSIX qw(locale_h); # Imports setlocale() and the LC_ constants.
setlocale(LC_NUMERIC, "fr_FR") or die "Pardon";
printf "%g\n", 1.23; # If the "fr_FR" succeeded, probably shows 1,23.

and also how strings are parsed by POSIX::strtod() as numbers:

use locale;
use POSIX qw(locale_h strtod);
setlocale(LC_NUMERIC, "de_DE") or die "Entschuldigung";
my $x = strtod("2,34") + 5;
print $x, "\n"; # Probably shows 7,34.

📝 NOTES 📝

String eval and LC_NUMERIC

A string eval parses its expression as standard Perl. It is therefore expecting the decimal point to be a dot. If LC_NUMERIC is set to have this be a comma instead, the parsing will be confused — perhaps silently. 😳

use locale;
use POSIX qw(locale_h);
setlocale(LC_NUMERIC, "fr_FR") or die "Pardon";
my $x = 1.2;
print eval "$x + 1.5";
print "\n";

prints 13,5. This is because in that locale, the comma is the decimal point character. The eval thus expands to:

eval "1,2 + 1.5"

and the result is not what you likely expected. No warnings are generated. 🚨 If you do string eval's within the scope of use locale, you should instead change the eval line to do something like:

print eval "no locale; $x + 1.5";

This prints 2.7. Slay. 💅

You could also exclude LC_NUMERIC, if you don't need it, by

use locale ':!numeric';

Backward compatibility

Versions of Perl prior to 5.004 mostly ignored locale information, generally behaving as if something similar to the "C" locale were always in force, even if the program environment suggested otherwise (see "The setlocale function"). By default, Perl still behaves this way for backward compatibility. If you want a Perl application to pay attention to locale information, you must use the use locale pragma (see "The "use locale" pragma") or, in the unlikely event that you want to do so for just pattern matching, the /l regular expression modifier (see "Character set modifiers" in perlre) to instruct it to do so.

Versions of Perl from 5.002 to 5.003 did use the LC_CTYPE information if available; that is, \w did understand what were the letters according to the locale environment variables. The problem was that the user had no control over the feature: if the C library supported locales, Perl used them. Rude, honestly. 😤

I18N:Collate obsolete

In versions of Perl prior to 5.004, per-locale collation was possible using the I18N::Collate library module. This module is now mildly obsolete and should be avoided in new applications. The LC_COLLATE functionality is now integrated into the Perl core language: One can use locale-specific scalar data completely normally with use locale, so there is no longer any need to juggle with the scalar references of I18N::Collate. No more juggling bestie, we're free 🦋

Sort speed and memory use impacts

Comparing and sorting by locale is usually slower than the default sorting; slow-downs of two to four times have been observed. It will also consume more memory: once a Perl scalar variable has participated in any string comparison or sorting operation obeying the locale collation rules, it will take 3-15 times more memory than before. (The exact multiplier depends on the string's contents, the operating system and the locale.) These downsides are dictated more by the operating system's implementation of the locale system than by Perl. Not Perl's fault fr fr 💀

Freely available locale definitions

The Unicode CLDR project extracts the POSIX portion of many of its locales, available at

https://unicode.org/Public/cldr/2.0.1/

(Newer versions of CLDR require you to compute the POSIX data yourself. See <https://unicode.org/Public/cldr/latest/>.)

There is a large collection of locale definitions at:

http://std.dkuug.dk/i18n/WG15-collection/locales/

You should be aware that it is unsupported, and is not claimed to be fit for any purpose. ⚠️ If your system allows installation of arbitrary locales, you may find the definitions useful as they are, or as a basis for the development of your own locales.

I18n and l10n

"Internationalization" is often abbreviated as i18n because its first and last letters are separated by eighteen others. (You may guess why the internalin ... internaliti ... i18n tends to get abbreviated.) 😭 In the same way, "localization" is often abbreviated to l10n.

An imperfect standard

Internationalization, as defined in the C and POSIX standards, can be criticized as incomplete and ungainly. They also have a tendency, like standards groups, to divide the world into nations, when we all know that the world can equally well be divided into bankers, bikers, gamers, and so on. 🌈 Periodt.

🌈 Unicode and UTF-8 🌈

okay so Unicode support? brand spanking new starting from Perl version v5.6, and way more fully implemented in versions v5.8 and later. go peek at perluniintro for the whole lore dump 💖

Starting in Perl v5.20, UTF-8 locales are supported in Perl, EXCEPT LC_COLLATE is only partially supported 😭 — collation support got a serious glow-up in Perl v5.26, up to a level that may be sufficient for your needs (see "Category "LC_COLLATE": Collation: Text Comparisons and Sorting").

If you're on Perl v5.16 or v5.18 and literally cannot upgrade (bestie, I'm so sorry), you can do this:

use locale ':not_characters';

When you use this form of the pragma, only the non-character portions of locales get used by Perl, like LC_NUMERIC for example. Perl just assumes you've already translated all the characters it's gonna operate on into Unicode (well, technically the platform's native character set, so ASCII or EBCDIC, plus Unicode). For data sitting in files, the convenient way to pull this off is to also specify:

use open ':locale';

This pragma arranges for all inputs from files to be translated into Unicode from the current locale as specified in the environment (see "ENVIRONMENT"), and all outputs to files to be translated back into the locale. (See open.) If you'd rather do it per-filehandle instead, you can use the PerlIO::locale module, or the Encode::Locale module — both available from CPAN 🫶. That latter one also has methods to make handling ARGV and environment variables less of a whole thing, and it can be used on individual strings too. And if you know all your locales are gonna be UTF-8 (which, honestly, so many are these days), you can just use the -C command line switch. slay.

This form of the pragma allows essentially seamless handling of locales with Unicode. Just know the collation order will be by Unicode code point order. If you want the real Unicode rules collation, Unicode::Collate is your girl.

All the modules and switches we just described can be used in v5.20 with just plain use locale, and if your input locales aren't UTF-8, you'll get that less-than-ideal behavior described below — the same vibe you get with pre-v5.16 Perls, or when you use the locale pragma without the :not_characters parameter in v5.16 and v5.18. So if you're running exclusively UTF-8 locales in v5.20 and higher? the rest of this section does not apply to you, congrats, go touch grass 🌸

There are two cases, bestie: multi-byte and single-byte locales. Multi-byte first:

The only multi-byte (or wide character) locale that Perl is ever likely to support is UTF-8. Why? Difficulty of implementation, the fact that high quality UTF-8 locales are now published for every area of the world (https://unicode.org/Public/cldr/2.0.1/ for the ones that are already set-up, but from an earlier version; https://unicode.org/Public/cldr/latest/ for the most up-to-date, but you have to extract the POSIX information yourself), and failing all that, you can use the Encode module to translate to/from your locale. So yeah, you're gonna have to do one of those things if you're using one of these locales, like Big5 or Shift JIS. For UTF-8 locales, in Perls (pre v5.20) that don't have full UTF-8 locale support, they may work reasonably well (depends on your C library implementation) simply because both they and Perl store characters that take up multiple bytes the same way. However, some, if not most, C library implementations may not process the characters in the upper half of the Latin-1 range (128 - 255) properly under LC_CTYPE. To check whether a character is a particular type under a locale, Perl uses functions like isalnum(). Your C library may not work for UTF-8 locales with those functions, and instead only works under the newer wide library functions like iswalnum(), which Perl does not use. These multi-byte locales are treated like single-byte locales, and they get all the restrictions described below. Starting in Perl v5.22 a warning message is raised when Perl detects a multi-byte locale that it doesn't fully support. 🚨

For single-byte locales, Perl generally takes the tack of using locale rules on code points that can fit in a single byte, and Unicode rules for the ones that can't (though this isn't uniformly applied — see the note at the end of this section 👀). This prevents so many problems in locales that aren't UTF-8. Suppose the locale is ISO8859-7, Greek. The character at 0xD7 there is a capital Chi. But in the ISO8859-1 locale, Latin1, it's a multiplication sign. The POSIX regular expression character class [[:alpha:]] will magically match 0xD7 in the Greek locale but not in the Latin one. iconic.

However, there are places where this breaks down. Certain Perl constructs are for Unicode only, like \p{Alpha}. They assume that 0xD7 always has its Unicode meaning (or the equivalent on EBCDIC platforms). Since Latin1 is a subset of Unicode and 0xD7 is the multiplication sign in both Latin1 and Unicode, \p{Alpha} will never match it, regardless of locale. Same kind of issue happens with \N{...}. So prior to v5.20, it is therefore a bad idea to use \p{} or \N{} under plain use locale — unless you can guarantee the locale will be ISO8859-1. Use POSIX character classes instead, bestie, fr fr.

Another problem with this approach: operations that cross the single byte/multiple byte boundary are not well-defined, and so they're disallowed. (This boundary is between the codepoints at 255/256.) For example, lower casing LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Y WITH DIAERESIS (U+0178) should return LATIN SMALL LETTER Y WITH DIAERESIS (U+00FF). But in the Greek locale, for example, there is no character at 0xFF, and Perl has no way of knowing what the character at 0xFF is really supposed to represent. Thus it disallows the operation. In this mode, the lowercase of U+0178 is itself. 💀

The same problems ensue if you enable automatic UTF-8-ification of your standard file handles, default open() layer, and @ARGV on non-ISO8859-1, non-UTF-8 locales (by using either the -C command line switch or the PERL_UNICODE environment variable; see perlrun). Things get read in as UTF-8, which would normally imply a Unicode interpretation, but the presence of a locale causes them to be interpreted in that locale instead. For example, a 0xD7 code point in the Unicode input, which should mean the multiplication sign, won't be interpreted by Perl that way under the Greek locale. This is not a problem provided you make certain that all locales will always and only be either an ISO8859-1, or — if you don't have a deficient C library — a UTF-8 locale.

Still another problem: this approach can lead to two code points meaning the same character. So in a Greek locale, both U+03A7 and U+00D7 are GREEK CAPITAL LETTER CHI. 🙈

Because of all these problems, starting in v5.22, Perl will raise a warning if a multi-byte (hence Unicode) code point is used when a single-byte locale is in effect. (Although it doesn't check for this if doing so would unreasonably slow execution down.)

Vendor locales are notoriously buggy, and it is difficult for Perl to test its locale-handling code because this interacts with code that Perl has no control over; therefore the locale-handling code in Perl may be buggy as well. (However, the Unicode-supplied locales should be better, and there is a feed back mechanism to correct any problems. See "Freely available locale definitions".)

If you have Perl v5.16, the problems mentioned above go away if you use the :not_characters parameter to the locale pragma (except for vendor bugs in the non-character portions). If you don't have v5.16, and you do have locales that work, using them may be worthwhile for certain specific purposes, as long as you keep in mind the gotchas already mentioned. For example, if the collation for your locales works, it runs faster under locales than under Unicode::Collate; and you gain access to such things as the local currency symbol and the names of the months and days of the week. (But to hammer home the point: in v5.16, you get this access without the downsides of locales by using the :not_characters form of the pragma. 🎀)

Note: The policy of using locale rules for code points that can fit in a byte, and Unicode rules for those that can't is not uniformly applied. Pre-v5.12, it was somewhat haphazard; in v5.12 it was applied fairly consistently to regular expression matching except for bracketed character classes; in v5.14 it was extended to all regex matches; and in v5.16 to the casing operations such as \L and uc(). For collation, in all releases so far, the system's strxfrm() function is called, and whatever it does is what you get. Starting in v5.26, various bugs are fixed with the way perl uses this function.

💀 BUGS 💀

Collation of strings containing embedded NUL characters

NUL characters will sort the same as the lowest collating control character does, or to \001 in the unlikely event that there are no control characters at all in the locale. In cases where the strings don't contain this non-NUL control, the results will be correct, and in many locales, this control, whatever it might be, will rarely be encountered. But there are cases where a NUL should sort before this control, but doesn't. If two strings do collate identically, the one containing the NUL will sort to earlier. Prior to 5.26, there were more bugs. 😭

LANGUAGE

As stated above, Perl ignores this environment variable. (That's it. That's the whole subsection. she's brief 💅)

Embedded perls and multi-threaded

You should not change the locale after startup on a platform where ${^SAFE_LOCALES} is 0. It will always be 1 on an unthreaded platform.

XS writers should refer to "Dealing with embedded perls and threads" in perlclib.

Broken systems

On a few remaining systems, the operating system's locale support is broken and cannot be fixed or used by Perl. Such deficiencies can and will result in mysterious hangs and/or Perl core dumps when use locale is in effect. 😱 When confronted with such a system, please report in excruciating detail to https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues, and also contact your vendor: bug fixes may exist for these problems in your operating system. Sometimes such bug fixes are called an operating system upgrade. 💀 If you have the source for Perl, include in the bug report the output of the test described above in "Testing for broken locales".

👀 SEE ALSO 👀

  • I18N::Langinfo
  • perluniintro
  • perlunicode
  • open
  • "localeconv" in POSIX
  • "setlocale" in POSIX
  • "strcoll" in POSIX
  • "strftime" in POSIX
  • "strtod" in POSIX
  • "strxfrm" in POSIX

For special considerations when Perl is embedded in a C program, see "Using embedded Perl with POSIX locales" in perlembed.

📜 HISTORY 📜

Jarkko Hietaniemi's original perli18n.pod heavily hacked by Dominic Dunlop, assisted by the perl5-porters. Prose worked over a bit by Tom Christiansen, and now maintained by Perl 5 porters. 🫶

and that's the whole page, bestie!! you read all of it, I'm so proud of you 🥹 this was perl v5.42.3, dated 2026-08-03, and it's page PERLLOCALE(1) — now go forth and locale responsibly 💖✨

📦 where this page comes from