locales

R Base 3.6.2

Get details of or set aspects of the locale for the R process.

Syntax

Sys.getlocale(category = "LC_ALL")
Sys.setlocale(category = "LC_ALL", locale = "")

Arguments

Parameter	Description
`category`	character string. The following categories should always be supported: "LC_ALL", "LC_COLLATE", "LC_CTYPE", "LC_MONETARY", "LC_NUMERIC" and "LC_TIME". Some systems (not Windows) will also support "LC_MESSAGES", "LC_PAPER" and "LC_MEASUREMENT".
`locale`	character string. A valid locale name on the system in use. Normally "" (the default) will pick up the default locale for the system.

Return Value

A character string of length one describing the locale in use (after setting for Sys.setlocale), or an empty character string if the current locale settings are invalid or NULL if locale information is unavailable. For category = "LC_ALL" the details of the string are system-specific: it might be a single locale name or a set of locale names separated by "/" (Solaris, macOS) or ";" (Windows, Linux). For portability, it is best to query categories individually: it is not necessarily the case that

Details

The locale describes aspects of the internationalization of a program. Initially most aspects of the locale of R are set to "C" (which is the default for the C language and reflects North-American usage -- also known as "POSIX"). R sets "LC_CTYPE" and "LC_COLLATE", which allow the use of a different character set and alphabetic comparisons in that character set (including the use of sort), "LC_MONETARY" (for use by Sys.localeconv) and "LC_TIME" may affect the behaviour of as.POSIXlt and strptime and functions which use them (but not date). The first seven categories described here are those specified by POSIX. "LC_MESSAGES" will be "C" on systems that do not support message translation, and is not supported on Windows. Trying to use an unsupported category is an error for Sys.setlocale. No

Examples

Example

# NOT RUN {
Sys.getlocale()
Sys.getlocale("LC_TIME")
# }
# NOT RUN {
Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME", "de")     # Solaris: details are OS-dependent
Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME", "de_DE")  # Many Unix-alikes
Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME", "de_DE.UTF-8")  # Linux, macOS, other Unix-alikes
Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME", "de_DE.utf8")   # some Linux versions
Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME", "German") # Windows
# }
# NOT RUN {
Sys.getlocale("LC_PAPER")          # may or may not be set

# }
# NOT RUN {
Sys.setlocale("LC_COLLATE", "C")   # turn off locale-specific sorting,
                                   # usually (but not on all platforms)
# }