Locale environment variables: difference between C and C.UTF-8

user_9704496 0
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What is the difference between languages that end in UTF-8 and those that don't? In particular between it_IT and it_IT.UTF-8, and then the one that interests me most which is between C and C.UTF-8. What should I put between C and C.UTF-8 in the variable "LC_ALL" for example?

Here is the list that appears when I run the locale -a command, which is to make you better understand what my concerns are.

C
C.utf8
en_AG
en_AG.utf8
en_AU.utf8
en_BW.utf8
en_CA.utf8
en_DK.utf8
en_GB.utf8
en_HK.utf8
en_IE.utf8
en_IL
en_IL.utf8
en_IN
en_IN.utf8
en_NG
en_NG.utf8
en_NZ.utf8
en_PH.utf8
en_SG.utf8
en_US.utf8
en_ZA.utf8
en_ZM
en_ZM.utf8
en_ZW.utf8
it_CH.utf8
it_IT.utf8
POSIX
ubuntu-22.04 locale bash
2 Answers

The main difference between languages that end in UTF-8 and those that don't is that the former supports Unicode, which is a character encoding that can represent a wide range of characters from different scripts. This allows for a more internationalized environment, as it allows for text to be displayed in a variety of languages.

LC_ALL should be set to "it_IT.UTF-8" to enable Unicode support for the Italian language.

user_110593350

I'd recommend to use UTF-8 locale which is more versatile.

For example, in Git Bash :

LC_ALL=C grep -P hello /dev/null
# output :
# grep: -P supports only unibyte and UTF-8 locales

LC_ALL=C.UTF-8 grep -P hello /dev/null
# No output
user_21256710
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