How to check system default locale for current user?

Hi Lili,
The command for reading the locale for the GUI is:

defaults read "Apple Global Domain" AppleLocale

The initial lower case letters represent the language, which generally enough for most purposes. The upper case letters after the underscore represent the country. That might matter is you're out in the "colonies". After the period is the character encoding, which I think is very important although I believe that UTF-8 is now the default, as it should be.

On the other hand, I've not heard anyone say that you can change the character encoding for the GUI. Apple was very careful to label that property "AppleLocale" and the possibilities in /usr/share/locale are purely for the UNIX part of the system. I feel confident that the letters before the period mean the same things and they should work the same way for every locale that AppleLocale supports. I simply don't know about the character encodings.
--
Gary
~~~~
Most rock journalism is people who can't write
interviewing people who can't talk for people
who can't read.
-- Frank Zappa