locale − Perl pragma to use or avoid POSIX locales for built−in operations
@x = sort @y; # Unicode sorting order
{
use locale;
@x = sort @y; # Locale−defined sorting order
}
@x = sort @y; # Unicode sorting order again
This pragma tells the compiler to enable (or disable) the use of POSIX locales for built-in operations (for example, LC_CTYPE for regular expressions, LC_COLLATE for string comparison, and LC_NUMERIC for number formatting). Each "use locale" or "no locale" affects statements to the end of the enclosing BLOCK .
Starting in Perl 5.16, a hybrid mode for this pragma is available,
use locale ':not_characters';
which enables only the portions of locales that don’t affect the character set (that is, all except LC_COLLATE and LC_CTYPE ). This is useful when mixing Unicode and locales, including UTF−8 locales.
use locale ':not_characters';
use open ":locale"; # Convert I/O to/from Unicode
use POSIX qw(locale_h); # Import the LC_ALL constant
setlocale(LC_ALL, ""); # Required for the next statement
# to take effect
printf "%.2f\n", 12345.67' # Locale−defined formatting
@x = sort @y; # Unicode−defined sorting order.
# (Note that you will get better
# results using Unicode::Collate.)
See perllocale for more detailed information on how Perl supports locales.