# How often single-byte encoding locales used in the wild?



## vsespb (Aug 30, 2013)

I wonder how often in the *BSD world real users use non-UTF8 locales? Are there existing supported *BSD distributions where non-UTF8 locale is the default after the initial install? Are there any statistics?

I am asking because I am developing software for POSIX systems and trying to determine how important support for non-UTF8 locales is (there are a number of caveats in implementing it for my case, which makes it complicated, but it's probably irrelevant to this thread).


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## kpa (Aug 30, 2013)

I would guess they are still very common because if your native language is English there's very little reason to use the UTF-8 encoding.


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## vsespb (Aug 30, 2013)

Ok, I see. I must clarify then, that I am only interested in cases of non-English languages (i.e. with non-ASCII-7bit characters, where encoding matters).


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