[NBLUG/talk] locales

[Eric Eisenhart]

On Mon, Jun 30, 2003 at 02:04:03PM -0700, E Frank Ball wrote:
> OK I found out how to set them, but what is the difference between
> these, and why would I choose a particular one for the default?
> 
>   en_US.ISO-8859-1... done
>   en_US.ISO-8859-15... done
>   en_US.UTF-8... done

As I'm sure you can tell, they're all "English as spoken and written in the
US" -- the "C" locale is basically en_US.ascii.  The only difference is your
preferred character set.

8859-1 is the standard "Latin 1" character set; basically ASCII plus the
accents you see in English, Spanish, French, Italian, etc.

Looks like 8859-15 is a slightly updated version of Latin1 that came
slightly too late to actually be used anywhere.

UTF-8 means "Unicode".  This is the direction the industry is moving in. 
Specifically, UTF-8 is a Unicode encoding where everything you did in
regular old ASCII is exactly the same and there's special 8-bit encodings
for the things outside of that.

http://czyborra.com/charsets/iso8859.html
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html

ISO-8859-1 is probably the normal "default", though UTF-8 wouldn't hurt and
ISO-8859-15 might be handy if you can't use UTF-8 and need a Euro symbol.

Personally, I'd go with UTF-8 and if it ever caused problems, go back to
ISO-8859-1 or 15.  There's all sorts of automatic conversions and whatnot,
anyways.
-- 
Eric Eisenhart
NBLUG Co-Founder & Vice-President Pro Tempore
The North Bay Linux Users Group
http://nblug.org/
eric at nblug.org, IRC: Freiheit at freenode, AIM: falschfreiheit, ICQ: 48217244