1Locale::Util(3) User Contributed Perl Documentation Locale::Util(3)
2
6 Locale::Util - Portable l10n and i10n functions
7
9 use Locale::Util;
10 my @linguas = parse_http_accept_language $ENV{HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE};
12 my @charsets = parse_http_accept_charset $ENV{HTTP_ACCEPT_CHARSET};
14 # Trie to set the locale to Brasilian Portuguese in UTF-8.
16 my $set_locale = set_locale LC_ALL, 'pt', 'BR', 'utf-8';
17 set_locale_cache $last_cache;
19 my $cache = get_locale_cache;
21 web_set_locale ($ENV{HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE}, $ENV_ACCEPT_CHARSET);
23 web_set_locale (['fr-BE', 'fr', 'it'], ['cp1252', 'utf-8']);
25
27 This module provides portable functions dealing with localization
28 (l10n) and internationalization(i10n). It doesn't export anything by
29 default, you have to specify each function you need in the import list,
30 or use the fully qualified name.
31 The functions here have a focus on web development, although they are
33 general enough to have them in the Locale:: namespace.
34 This module is considered alpha code. The interface is not stable.
36 Please contact the author if you want to use it in production code.
37 This module was introduced in libintl-perl 1.17.
39
41 parse_http_accept_language STRING
42 Parses a string as passed in the HTTP header "Accept-Language". It
43 returns a list of tokens sorted by the quality value, see RFC 2616
44 for details.
45 Example:
47 parse_http_accept ("fr-fr, fr; q=0.7, de; q=0.3");
49 This means: Give me French for France with a quality value of 1.0
51 (the maximum). Otherwise I will take any other French version
52 (quality 0.7), German has a quality of 0.3 for me.
53 The function will return a list of tokens in the order of their
55 quality values, in this case "fr-fr", "fr" and "de".
56 The function is more forgiving than RFC 2616. It accepts quality
58 values greater than 1.0 and with more than 3 decimal places. It
59 also accepts languages and country names with more than 8
60 characters. The language "*" is translated into "C".
61 parse_http_accept_charset STRING
63 Parses a string as passed in the HTTP header "Accept-Charset". It
64 returns a list of tokens sorted by the quality value, see RFC 2616
65 for details.
66 The special character set "*" (means all character sets) will be
68 translated to the undefined value.
69 set_locale CATEGORY, LANGUAGE[, COUNTRY, CHARSET]
71 Tries to set the user locale by means of POSIX::setlocale(). The
72 latter function has the disadvantage, that its second argument (the
73 locale description string) is completely non-standard and system-
74 dependent. This function tries its best at guessing the system's
75 notion of a locale dientifier, with the arguments supplied:
76 CATEGORY
78 An integer argument for a valid locale category. These are
79 the LC_* constants (LC_ALL, LC_CTIME, LC_COLLATE, ...)
80 defined in both Locale::Messages(3pm) and POSIX(3pm).
81 LANGUAGE
83 A 2-letter language identifier as per ISO 639. Case
84 doesn't matter, but an unchanged version (ie. not lower-
85 cased) of the language you provided will always be tried
86 to.
87 COUNTRY A 2-letter language identifier as per ISO 639. Case
89 doesn't matter, but an unchanged version (ie. not lower-
90 cased) of the language you provided will always be tried
91 to.
92 This parameter is optional. If it is not defined, the
94 function will try to guess an appropriate country,
95 otherwise leave it to the operating system.
96 CHARSET A valid charset name. Valid means valid! The charset
98 "utf8" is not valid (it is "utf-8"). Charset names that
99 are accepted by the guessing algorithms in Encode(3pm) are
100 also not necessarily valid.
101 If the parameter is undefined, it is ignored. It is always
103 ignored under Windows.
104 The function tries to approach the desired locale in loops,
106 refining it on every success. It will first try to set the
107 language (for any country), then try to select the correct
108 language, and finally try to select the correct charset.
109 The return value is false in case of failure, or the return value
111 of the underlying POSIX::setlocale() call in case of success.
112 In array context, the function returns the country name that was
114 passed in the successful call to POSIX::setlocale(). If this
115 string is equal to the country name you passed as an argument, you
116 can be reasonably sure that the settings for this country are
117 really used. If it is not equal, the function has taken a guess at
118 the country (it has a list of "default" countries for each
119 language). It seems that under Windows, POSIX::setlocale() also
120 succeeds, if you pass a country name that is actually not
121 supported. Therefore, the information is not completely reliable.
122 Please note that this function is intended for server processes
124 (especially web applications) that need to switch in a portable way
125 to a certain locale. It is not the recommended way to set the
126 program locale for a regular application. In a regular application
127 you should do the following:
128 use POSIX qw (setlocale LC_ALL);
130 setlocale LC_ALL, '';
131 The empty string as the second argument means, that the system
133 should switch to the user's default locale.
134 get_locale_cache
136 The function set_locale() is potentially expansive, especially when
137 it fails, because it can try a lot of different combinations, and
138 the system may have to load a lot of locale definitions from its
139 internal database.
140 In order to speed up things, results are internally cached in a
142 hash, keys are the languages, subkeys countries, subsubkeys the
143 charsets. You can get a reference to this hash with
144 get_locale_cache().
145 The function cannot fail.
147 set_locale_cache HASH
149 Sets the internal cache. You can either pass a hash or a hash
150 reference. The function will use this as its cache, discarding its
151 old cache. This allows you to keep the hash persistent.
152 The function cannot fail.
154 web_set_locale (ACCEPT_LANGUAGE, ACCEPT_CHARSET, CATEGORY, AVAILABLE)
156 Try to change the locale to the settings described by
157 ACCEPT_LANGUAGE and ACCEPT_CHARSET. For each argument you can
158 either pass a string as in the corresponding http header, or a
159 reference to an array of language resp. charset identifiers.
160 Currently only the first charset passed is used as an argument.
162 You are strongly encouraged to pass a hard-coded value here, so
163 that you have control about your output.
164 The argument CATEGORY specifies the category (one of the LC_*
166 constants as defined in Locale::Messages(3pm) or in POSIX(3pm)).
167 The category defaults to LC_ALL.
168 You can pass an optional reference to a list of locales in XPG4
170 format that are available in your application. This is useful if
171 you know which languages are supported by your application. In
172 fact, only the language part of the values in the list are
173 considered (for example for "en_US", only "en" is used). The
174 country or other parts are ignored.
175 The function returns the return value of the underlying
177 set_locale() call, or false on failure.
178 The function returns false on failure. On success it returns the
180 return value of the underlying set_locale() call. This value can
181 be used directly in subsequent calls to POSIX::setlocale(). In
182 array context, it additionally returns the identifiers for the
183 language, the country, and the charset actually used.
184
186 The function set_locale() probably fails to guess the correct locale
187 identifier on a lot of systems. If you have found such a case, please
188 submit it as a bug report.
189 The bug tracking system for this packags is at
191 http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/Bugs.html?libintl-perl
192 Please note that this module is considered alpha code, and the
194 interface is not stable. Please contact the author, if you want to use
195 it in production code.
196
198 Copyright (C) 2002-2017 Guido Flohr <http://www.guido-flohr.net/>
199 (<mailto:guido.flohr@cantanea.com>), all rights reserved. See the
200 source code for details!code for details!
201
203 POSIX(3pm), perl(1)
204
206 Hey! The above document had some coding errors, which are explained
207 below:
208 Around line 1208:
210 =cut found outside a pod block. Skipping to next block.
211perl v5.32.1 2021-01-27 Locale::Util(3)