Sometimes it is useful for a program to be able to run a child process and
more or less depend on its output being valid UTF-8. This can usually be
accomplished by setting one or more environment variables, but there is
the question of what to set them to - what UTF-8-capable locale is present
on this particular system? This is where the utf8_locale module comes in.
detect_utf8_locale()The detect_utf8_locale() function runs the external locale command to
obtain a list of the supported locale names, and then picks a suitable one to
use so that programs are more likely to output valid UTF-8 characters and
language-neutral messages. It prefers the C base locale, but if neither
C.UTF-8 nor C.utf8 is available, it will fall back to a list of other
locale names that are likely to be present on the system.
get_utf8_vars()The get_utf8_vars() function invokes detect_utf8_locale() and then returns
a dictionary/hashmap containing two entries: LC_ALL set to the obtained
locale name and LANGUAGE set to an empty string so that recent versions of
the gettext library do not choose a different language to output messages in.
get_utf8_env()The get_utf8_env() function invokes detect_utf8_locale() and then returns
a dictionary/hashmap containing the current environment variables,
LC_ALL set to the obtained locale name, and LANGUAGE set to an empty
string so that recent versions of the gettext library do not choose
a different language to output messages in.
get_preferred_languages()The get_preferred_languages() function examines either the current process
environment or the provided dictionary and returns a list of the languages
specified in the locale variables (LC_ALL, LANG, LC_MESSAGES, etc).
It may be used by programs to add the user's currently preferred locale to
their own settings.