Re: UTF-8 locale

[Eli Zaretskii]

On Sun, 16 Dec 2001, Richard Stallman wrote:

>     Recent changes in mule-cmds.el automatically turn on the UTF-8 locale
>     when $LANG says so.
> 
> For which values of LANG does Emacs use UTF-8?

Those which match the regexp ".*utf\\(-?8\\)\\>".

> Also, what exactly does Emacs do to use it?

It sets the language environment to "utf-8", and sets the default and 
preferred coding systems to utf-8.  It also sets the default input 
method.

> Since Emacs (mostly) doesn't use locales for its own work,
> I'm not sure just what "turn on the UTF-8 locale" refers to.

The values of LANG/LC_ALL are used to set the language environment and 
the locale-coding-system (the latter is used on X for decoding X keysyms, 
which is important when the keyboard sends non-ASCII keysyms, like with 
dead keys).  That is what I meant by ``turning on the UTF-8 locale''; 
sorry for the vague wording.