Development Guides Home >> Guide to Locales
The locale system's character set is always utf-8.
While it is possible to use other character sets for the locale system, utf-8 offers many benefits that other character sets lack, and has no known issues. For this reason, we only recommend utf-8 locales.
If you receive character encoding errors or other "garbled" text, read our Troubleshooting documentation.
The locale system uses the utf-8 character encoding for several specific reasons:
- Character sets and collations are complicated topics. A unified standard simplifies the localization process immensely.
utf-8support is universal.utf-8allows you to list multiple languages in a single interface or file (for example, to create a menu of available locales).utf-8ensures that the locale system can interact with external systems (for example, file editors and databases).- Languages like JavaScript and Perl can natively use
utf-8data.
While it is possible for a locale to use another character encoding, we have yet to find a good reason to do so. For this reason, we will not document how to use a different character set. If, however, you think that you have found a valid reason to use another character set, we would be happy to consider it. Reach out to us in Discord with the technical reasons why your project requires a locale in another encoding.
For more information about utf-8, we recommend that you watch Dan Muey's I ♥ Unicode presentation from OSCon 2014.