Re: Emacs and UTF-8 locale

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Tomohiro KUBOTA <address@hidden>
> Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001 23:37:40 +0900
> 
> > > It is important that you do not only test LANG, but the first variable
> > > in the sequence LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG that has a value.
> > 
> > That is what Emacs does.
> 
> Why limiting to UTF-8?  Since LC_CTYPE locale is widely used not
> only for UTF-8 encodings but also for various encodings, and since
> GNU Emacs supports such various encodings, I think it is a good idea
> to use LC_CTYPE locale not only for detecting UTF-8 mode but also
> for detecting other encodings such as ISO-8859-*, KOI8-*, EUC-*,
> TIS-620, Big5, and so on.

Emacs indeed does that for all locales, not just for UTF-8.  For the
details, see the node "Language Environments" in the Emacs manual and
the function set-locale-environment on lisp/international/mule-cmds.el.

Note that the code which looks at LANG and the LC_* variables is not
new, Emacs was doing that since the release of v21.1 two months ago.
The only new aspect is the addition of UTF-8 to the list of known
locale and language names; this was disabled previously because stock
Emacs 21.1 lacked some user-level features which are required for a
decent support of UTF-8 locales.