Hola! I am in section 7.13 and am now attempting to figure out my locale. I live in the United States and speak English.... well not British English, but anyways! So I run 'locale -a' and get this list: I am told the first two letters represent the language and the second two letters represent the country. but what about the characters after that? in my particular case I would choose en_US, en_US.iso88591, or en_US.utf8. If I remember correctly from what I've seen I should select en_US.iso88591 but I am not sure. I also would like to know what the differences are between the three and why I should select one over the other... if that is not two much trouble... okay after a little more looking found that:

   The only difference between en_US and en_US.utf8 is that the former uses ISO-8859-1 for a character set, while the latter uses UTF-8. Prefer UTF-8. The only difference in these is in what characters they are capable of representing. ISO-8859-1 represents characters common to many Americans (the English alphabet, plus a few letters with accents), whereas UTF-8 encodes all of Unicode, and thus, just about any language you can think of. UTF-8, today, is a defacto standard encoding for text. (Which is why you should prefer it.)