25.9. Internationalization
Use Unicode inside your program. Do any translation to and from other
character sets at your interfaces to the outside world. See Chapter 15, "Unicode".Outside the world of Unicode, you should assume little about character
sets and nothing about the ord values of characters. Do not assume
that the alphabetic characters have sequential ord values. The
lowercase letters may come before or after the uppercase letters; the
lowercase and uppercase may be interlaced so that both a and A
come before b; the accented and other international characters may
be interlaced so that ä comes before b.If your program is to operate on a POSIX system (a rather large
assumption), consult the perllocale manpage for more
information about POSIX locales. Locales affect character sets and
encodings, and date and time formatting, among other things. Proper
use of locales will make your program a little bit more portable, or at
least more convenient and native-friendly for non-English users. But
be aware that locales and Unicode don''t mix well yet.