Checking the locale configuration on UNIX platforms

On UNIX™ systems, the locale command without parameters outputs information about the current locale environment.

The locale is typically set with the LANG or, preferably with the LC_ALL environment variable. When the LC_ALL variable is defined, LANG is ignored:

$ export LANG=en_US.ISO8859-1

$ unset LC_ALL

$ locale 
LANG=en_US.ISO8859-1
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="en_US.ISO8859-1"
LC_NUMERIC=en_US.UTF-8
LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE="en_US.ISO8859-1"
LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.ISO8859-1"
LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8
LC_NAME="en_US.ISO8859-1"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.ISO8859-1"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.ISO8859-1"
LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.ISO8859-1"
LC_ALL=

$ export LC_ALL=POSIX

LANG=en_US.ISO8859-1
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="POSIX"
LC_NUMERIC="POSIX"
LC_TIME="POSIX"
LC_COLLATE="POSIX"
LC_MONETARY="POSIX"
LC_MESSAGES="POSIX"
LC_PAPER="POSIX"
LC_NAME="POSIX"
LC_ADDRESS="POSIX"
LC_TELEPHONE="POSIX"
LC_MEASUREMENT="POSIX"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="POSIX"
LC_ALL=POSIX

Use the fglrun -i command to check current locale settings for FGL:

$ fglrun -i
Charmap      : ASCII
Multibyte    : no
Stateless    : yes
Length Semantics : BYTE

Here the charset used is the ASCII (POSIX) charset. Clearing the LC_ALL environment variable and setting the LC_CTYPE to a different value as LANG gives the following:

$ unset LC_ALL

$ export LC_CTYPE=zh_TW.big5

$ locale
LANG=fr_FR.ISO-8859-1
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE=zh_TW.big5
LC_NUMERIC=en_US.UTF-8
LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE="fr_FR.ISO-8859-1"
LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES="fr_FR.ISO-8859-1"
LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8
LC_NAME="fr_FR.ISO-8859-1"
LC_ADDRESS="fr_FR.ISO-8859-1"
LC_TELEPHONE="fr_FR.ISO-8859-1"
LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION="fr_FR.ISO-8859-1"
LC_ALL=

$ fglrun -i
Charmap      : BIG5
Multibyte    : yes
Stateless    : yes
Length Semantics : BYTE

If the current locale settings is not supported by FGL, you get the following output:

$ fglrun -i
Error: locale not supported by C library, check LANG/LC_ALL.

Tip: If the locale environment is not correct, check the value of the following environment variables: LANG, LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, LC_NUMERIC, LC_TIME, LC_COLLATE, etc.

The next example shows how to define a UTF-8 character set with character length semantics (FGL_LENGTH_SEMANTICS):

$ export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

$ export FGL_LENGTH_SEMANTICS=CHAR

$ fglrun -i
Charmap      : UTF-8
Multibyte    : yes
Stateless    : yes
Length Semantics : CHAR