So far I had always used 'en_UK' for British English. Today I got an error when using it with Zend Framework because the locale is not included in the long list of recognized locales.
Here's just a short extract of that list:
'ee_GH' => true, 'ee_TG' => true, 'ee' => true, 'el_CY' => true, 'el_GR' => true,
'el' => true, 'en_AS' => true, 'en_AU' => true, 'en_BE' => true, 'en_BW' => true,
'en_BZ' => true, 'en_CA' => true, 'en_GB' => true, 'en_GU' => true, 'en_HK' => true,
'en_IE' => true, 'en_IN' => true, 'en_JM' => true, 'en_MH' => true, 'en_MP' => true,
'en_MT' => true, 'en_NA' => true, 'en_NZ' => true, 'en_PH' => true, 'en_PK' => true,
'en_SG' => true, 'en_TT' => true, 'en_UM' => true, 'en_US' => true, 'en_VI' => true,
'en_ZA' => true, 'en_ZW' => true, 'en' => true, 'eo' => true, 'es_AR' => true,
'es_BO' => true, 'es_CL' => true, 'es_CO' => true, 'es_CR' => true, 'es_DO' => true,
As you can see, there are all kinds of territories with English language and there is also an entry 'en_GB' which I assume stands for Great Britain... but there is no 'en_UK'. Is that just a 'bug' in Zend Framework or is there another reason for that?
Locales use ISO 3166-1 for country codes. The wikipedia writeup includes:
ReplyDeleteThe codes are chosen, according to the ISO 3166/MA, "to reflect the
significant, unique component of the country name in order to allow a
visual association between country name and country code".[7] For this
reason, common components of country names like "Republic", "Kingdom",
"United", "Federal" or "Democratic" are normally not used for deriving
the code elements. As a consequence, for example, the United Kingdom
is officially assigned the alpha-2 code GB rather than UK, based on
its official name "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern
Ireland" (although UK is reserved on the request of the United
Kingdom).
It is indeed a common (?) mistake. en_UK is wrong. The ISO country code for the UK is GB, making the language tag en_GB.
ReplyDeleteImperfect implementations
ReplyDeleteStarting in 1985, ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes have been used in the
Domain Name System as country code top-level domains (ccTLDs). The
Internet Assigned Numbers Authority currently assigns the ccTLDs
mostly following the alpha-2 codes, but with a few exceptions.[9] For
example, the United Kingdom, whose alpha-2 code is GB, uses .uk
instead of .gb as its ccTLD, as UK is currently exceptionally reserved
in ISO 3166-1 on the request of the United Kingdom.
According to wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2.
So apparently it's an old thing that has stuck or something like that.
EDIT: martin clayton found a better answer.
the correct country code in ISO 3166 for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is for some reason "GB", so the locale code should be en_GB, and not en_UK as noted here.
ReplyDeleteen_GB is also used by glibc, gnome, kde, etc
Also i like the fact that many previous bug fixes in opensource projects are related to this like in apache http 1.3 and roundcube project