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I am looking into terminal customisation, and in particular text encodings. I understand the differences between the UTF-*
encodings, and the differences between different encoding types, generally (e.g. ISO*
to UTF-*
, etc). However I don't quite understand their application to locales, or, for that matter, what particular locale settings are actually supposed to do.
If I type the command locale -a
into my terminal I'm presented with a list of possible locales I can use:
af_ZA
af_ZA.ISO8859-1
af_ZA.ISO8859-15
af_ZA.UTF-8
am_ET
am_ET.UTF-8
be_BY
be_BY.CP1131
... <~200 line snip>
C
POSIX
If I select, for example, af_ZA.UTF-8
, I can expect UTF-8 encoding in my terminal. That being the case, why does it matter that I have chosen af_ZA.UTF-8
rather than en_AU.UTF-8
(or fr_FR.UTF-8
)? Isn't it all just UTF-8? What does the language/location part of the locale actually do?