Re: The environment variable $LANGUAGE

[Miroslav Kure <kurem@upcase.inf.upol.cz>]

On Thu, Nov 03, 2005 at 07:02:01PM -0600, Ming Hua wrote:
> I have a question to the list:  What documentation should I read to
> understand the environment variable $LANGUAGE,

info libc -> Message Translation -> The Uniform approach ->
  Message catalogs with gettext -> Using gettextized software 

> and it's relationship with the ordinary locale variables ($LANG,
> $LC_*, and $LC_ALL)?

If set, LANGUAGE has higher priority than LANG, LC_MESSAGES and even
LC_ALL variable, but character *encoding* is still taken from LC_CTYPE.

E.g. this means that if you have locales en_GB.ISO-8859-1 and
zh_CN.UTF-8 and set your environment like
  LANG=en_GB
  LANGUAGE=zh_CN:en_GB
then you will not see correct Chinese characters, because in LC_CTYPE
there is ISO-8859-1 encoding, but you want to display zh_CN in UTF-8.

So the best usage would be to use only locales with the same encoding,
preferably UTF-8.

-- 
Miroslav Kure