Working on a new project whereby we're using PHP's money formatting (see PHP money_format), we ran into an issue whereby the money wasn't being formatted properly for french users.
Specifically, the period between the dollar and hundredth-dollar numbers is replaced by a comma. In order for this to be managed automatically by the function, the setlocale function needs to be called as follows:
setlocale(LC_MONETARY, 'fr_CA.UTF-8');
While the first argument could be the constant LC_ALL, in this case we simply
wanted the monetary functions to be formatted properly (eg. we're not following
the larger-standard for internationalization/i18n). I made a pretty silly and
invalid assumption that that was all it would take, but alas, the operating
system didn't have that language package installed. I believe it comes with the
english set by default on a fresh install, but not french.
Here were the steps I followed to get the french packages on the server:
sudo apt-get -y install language-pack-en
sudo locale-gen fr_CA.UTF-8
sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales
sudo vi /etc/default/locale
sudo reboot
When editing the /etc/default/locale file, I simply added in the following
line at the end of the file:
LANG="fr_CA.UTF-8"
After the reboot, the language file for Canadian french (in the UTF-8 encoding, by the way), is included and ready to use.