U8LOC(1)

💖 NAME 💖

okay so listen — this is u8loc, bestie, and it's from the General Commands Manual section of your friendly neighborhood man pages. Its whole job? run a program in a UTF-8-capable environment. That's it, that's the vibe. ✨

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🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

u8loc [-p] -r program [args...]
u8loc [-p] -q LC_ALL
u8loc [-p] -q LANGUAGE
u8loc -q preferred
u8loc -q list
u8loc --features

six whole shapes it can take, and yes, --features is one of them, iykyk 💅

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So here's the tea ☕: u8loc sets up your environment variables so that a child process you're about to run will hopefully spit out clean UTF-8 output. Hopefully, okay, that's the manpage's word, not mine — I'm just the messenger 🫶.

It's built for programs that want to reliably parse another program's output without worrying about character set conversions. No messy encoding drama, no mysterious mojibake. Just vibes and clean bytes. 😌

How does it do it? It calls the locale(1) tool to get a list of all the locale names your current system actually has valid definitions for, and then it filters and reorders that list based on either:

• a predefined list of language preferences, or
• if you pass the -p option, the language names it finds in your current environment's locale-related variables — you know, LC_ALL, LANG, LC_MESSAGES, LC_CTYPE, etc. 👑

The u8loc utility accepts the following command-line options:

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✨ OPTIONS ✨

• -p — Examine the current environment's locale-related variables and use the names of languages found there as a preference list for choosing a suitable locale. Basically: "what are you already into? let's work with that." 💅
• -q — Do not execute a program; output the detected environment settings instead, depending on the supplied argument:
  • LC_ALL — Output the selected UTF-8-capable locale name that would be placed into the LC_ALL environment variable.
  • LANGUAGE — Output the empty string that would be placed into the LANGUAGE environment variable. (Yes, empty. That's not a mistake, that's the actual answer. 💀)
  • list — List the available parameters for the -q option.
  • preferred — Output the list of languages gathered from examining the locale-related environment variables.
• -r — Set the LC_ALL and LANGUAGE variables in the environment and execute the specified program. This one actually does the thing 🔥

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🌸 ENVIRONMENT 🌸

If the -p option is specified, the locale-related environment variables get examined in order. And if any of them contains the name of a locale that specifies UTF-8 as its encoding — the manpage puts it as by either a “UTF-8 or “utf8 suffix””, quote marks exactly like that, I don't make the rules 🙈 — then the language name gets added to the list of preferences.

The variables examined are, in this exact order:

• LC_ALL
• LANG
• LC_MESSAGES
• LC_COLLATE
• LC_NAME
• LC_IDENTIFICATION
• LC_CTYPE
• LC_NUMERIC
• LC_TIME
• LC_MONETARY
• LC_PAPER
• LC_ADDRESS
• LC_TELEPHONE
• LC_MEASUREMENT

fourteen of them, all lined up, all in order, no skipping 👑

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🫶 EXIT STATUS 🫶

If an error happens while it's detecting a suitable UTF-8-capable locale, u8loc will exit with a non-zero error code. Not ideal, but at least you'll know. 😭

And if you specified -r, the specified program gets executed and replaces the u8loc process. So u8loc doesn't hang around afterwards — it hands over the aux cord and leaves the party. 🎧

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🌈 EXAMPLES 🌈

Output the name of a UTF-8-capable locale:

u8loc -q LC_ALL

Run a program in a UTF-8-friendly environment:

u8loc -r -- cal -3

the -- is there, do not @ me, it's in the original 💅

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⭐ STANDARDS ⭐

No standards documentation was harmed in the process of creating u8loc.

iconic behavior honestly. zero standards docs were traumatized in the making of this utility. 🙏

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💀 BUGS 💀

Please report any bugs in u8loc to the author. They want to know, bestie, they're not gonna be mad. 🫶

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

The u8loc utility was written by Peter Pentchev <roam@ringlet.net>.

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and that's the whole page, no cap 🎀 this one ships out of Debian, dated February 1, 2021 — so go forth, set your LC_ALL, and let your child processes produce immaculate UTF-8. periodt. 💖✨🦋