| locales {base} | R Documentation |
Get details of or set aspects of the locale for the R process.
Sys.getlocale(category = "LC_ALL") Sys.setlocale(category = "LC_ALL", locale = "")
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
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. |
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).
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).
R can be built with no support for locales, but it is normally available on Unix and is available on Windows.
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.
Note that setting "LC_ALL" sets only "LC_COLLATE",
"LC_CTYPE", "LC_MONETARY" and "LC_TIME".
Attempts to set an invalid locale are (silently) ignored. (Most OSes give no indication if the request succeeded, and the name of the locale set need bear little resemblance to that asked for.)
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 or a set of locales
separated by "/" (Solaris) or ";" (Windows, Linux). For
portability, it is best to query categories individually. It is
guaranteed that the result of foo <- Sys.getlocale() can be
used in Sys.setlocale("LC_ALL", locale = foo) on the same
machine.
Setting "LC_NUMERIC" may cause R to function
anomalously, so gives a warning. (The known problems are with
input conversion in locales with , as the decimal point.)
Setting it temporarily to produce graphical or text output may work
well enough, but options(OutDec) is often preferable.
strptime for uses of category = "LC_TIME".
Sys.localeconv for details of numerical and monetary
representations.
Sys.getlocale()
Sys.getlocale("LC_TIME")
## Not run:
Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME", "de") # Solaris 7: details are OS-dependent
Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME", "de_DE.utf8") # Modern Linux etc.
Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME", "German") # Windows
## End(Not run)
Sys.getlocale("LC_PAPER") # may or may not be set
Sys.setlocale("LC_COLLATE", "C") # turn off locale-specific sorting