locales                 package:base                 R Documentation

_Q_u_e_r_y _o_r _S_e_t _A_s_p_e_c_t_s _o_f _t_h_e _L_o_c_a_l_e

_D_e_s_c_r_i_p_t_i_o_n:

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

_U_s_a_g_e:

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

_A_r_g_u_m_e_n_t_s:

category: character string. Must be one of '"LC_ALL"', '"LC_COLLATE"',
          '"LC_CTYPE"', '"LC_MONETARY"', '"LC_NUMERIC"' or '"LC_TIME"'.

  locale: character string.  A valid locale name on the system in use.
          Normally '""' (the default) will pick up the default locale
          for the system.

_D_e_t_a_i_l_s:

     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.

     Some systems will have other locale categories, but the six
     described here are those specified by POSIX.

     Note that setting '"LC_ALL"' as from R 2.1.0 sets only
     '"LC_COLLATE"', '"LC_CTYPE"', '"LC_MONETARY"' and '"LC_TIME"'.

_V_a_l_u_e:

     A character string of length one describing the locale in use
     (after setting for 'Sys.setlocale'), or an empty character string
     if the locale is invalid (with a warning) 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.

_W_a_r_n_i_n_g:

     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.

_S_e_e _A_l_s_o:

     'strptime' for uses of 'category = "LC_TIME"'. 'Sys.localeconv'
     for details of numerical and monetary representations.

_E_x_a_m_p_l_e_s:

     Sys.getlocale()
     Sys.getlocale("LC_TIME")
     ## Not run: 
     Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME", "de")     # Solaris: details are OS-dependent
     Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME", "German") # Windows
     ## End(Not run)

     Sys.setlocale("LC_COLLATE", "C")  # turn off locale-specific sorting

