environment variable to determine the application's notions on collation
(ordering) of characters. For example, "b" follows "a" in Latin
alphabets, but where do "E<aacute>" and "E<aring>" belong? And while
-"color" follows "chocolate" in English, what about in Spanish?
+"color" follows "chocolate" in English, what about in traditional Spanish?
The following collations all make sense and you may meet any of them
if you "use locale".
Unfortunately, this creates big problems for regular expressions. "|" still
means alternation even though it matches C<\w>.
+Note that there are quite a few things that are unaffected by the
+current locale. All the escape sequences for particular characters,
+C<\n> for example, always mean the platform's native one. This means,
+for example, that C<\N> in regular expressions (every character
+but new-line) work on the platform character set.
+
B<Note:> A broken or malicious C<LC_CTYPE> locale definition may result
in clearly ineligible characters being considered to be alphanumeric by
your application. For strict matching of (mundane) ASCII letters and