[Techtalk] locales

[Wim De Smet]

On 7/13/07, Clayton <smaug42 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I am trying to decide if I should use en-US, en-US.ISO.8859-15, or
> > en-US.UTF-8. I tried googling and looking at the debian website, but
> > couldn't find anything very useful. How does one decide which locale to
> > use for the defualt?
>
> Tough question :-)  The short answer is that ISO 8859-1 (and -15) is a
> subset of UTF-8.

I don't think that's true. ASCII is a subset, ISO 8859-15 isn't, while
1 might be I'm not sure.

>
> The only real advantage I have ever seen with UTF-8 is when you want
> to use lots of odd/obscure extended characters beyond the ASCII chars
> you're typically used to.
>
> I tend to opt for ISO 8859-15.  Good character coverage (esp for
> Western European chars) plus the Euro symbol.

I'd go with UTF-8. It covers ASCII which is all an american would
normally use, and it's what most of the distros are moving to. In
practice you will probably not notice much of a difference since
programs tend to automatically translate text if they know about it,
but if you do find some text online with some unknown chars, chances
are high it will be in a unicode encoding, such as UTF-8, especially
going forward now.

greets,
Wim