[tlug] Perl and locale errors

["Jean-Christian Imbeault" <jean_christian@example.com>]

Dear Perl gurus ('cause I know there are some on this list ;),

I'm in the process of install perl 5.8 (I hear it has better support for 
parsing japanese text?) and I keep getting these errors:

perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
        LANGUAGE = (unset),
        LC_ALL = (unset),
        LANG = "en_US.ja_JP.eucJP"
    are supported and installed on your system.


I kind of understand what it's complaining about but I can understand *why* 
it's complaining.

Why is setting the locale important to Perl (i.e. how does it effect me 
(actually my programs) that "locale setting failed").

And if it really is important for me to fix this how do I go about it and 
more importantly what should I set the locale to? I want to work in english 
but I need to have perl work with files that contain japanese, mostly SJIS 
(yuck).

Thanks!

Jc

_________________________________________________________________
Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com