NAME¶
setlocale - set the current locale
SYNOPSIS¶
#include <locale.h>
char *setlocale(int category, const char *locale);
DESCRIPTION¶
The
setlocale() function is used to set or query the program's current
locale.
If
locale is not NULL, the program's current locale is modified according
to the arguments. The argument
category determines which parts of the
program's current locale should be modified.
| Category |
Governs |
| LC_ALL |
All of the locale |
| LC_ADDRESS |
Formatting of addresses and geography-related items (*) |
| LC_COLLATE |
String collation |
| LC_CTYPE |
Character classification |
| LC_IDENTIFICATION |
Metadata describing the locale (*) |
| LC_MEASUREMENT |
Settings related to measurements (metric versus US customary) (*) |
| LC_MESSAGES |
Localizable natural-language messages |
| LC_MONETARY |
Formatting of monetary values |
| LC_NAME |
Formatting of salutations for persons (*) |
| LC_NUMERIC |
Formatting of nonmonetary numeric values |
| LC_PAPER |
Settings related to the standard paper size (*) |
| LC_TELEPHONE |
Formats to be used with telephone services (*) |
| LC_TIME |
Formatting of date and time values |
The categories marked with an asterisk in the above table are GNU extensions.
For further information on these locale categories, see
locale(7).
The argument
locale is a pointer to a character string containing the
required setting of
category. Such a string is either a well-known
constant like "C" or "da_DK" (see below), or an opaque
string that was returned by another call of
setlocale().
If
locale is an empty string,
"", each part of the
locale that should be modified is set according to the environment variables.
The details are implementation-dependent. For glibc, first (regardless of
category), the environment variable
LC_ALL is inspected, next
the environment variable with the same name as the category (see the table
above), and finally the environment variable
LANG. The first existing
environment variable is used. If its value is not a valid locale
specification, the locale is unchanged, and
setlocale() returns NULL.
The locale
"C" or
"POSIX" is a portable
locale; its
LC_CTYPE part corresponds to the 7-bit ASCII character set.
A locale name is typically of the form
language[_
territory][.
codeset][@
modifier], where
language is an ISO 639 language code,
territory is an ISO 3166
country code, and
codeset is a character set or encoding identifier
like
ISO-8859-1 or
UTF-8. For a list of all supported locales,
try "locale -a", cf.
locale(1).
If
locale is NULL, the current locale is only queried, not modified.
On startup of the main program, the portable
"C" locale is
selected as default. A program may be made portable to all locales by calling:
setlocale(LC_ALL, "");
after program initialization, by using the values returned from a
localeconv(3) call for locale-dependent information, by using the
multibyte and wide character functions for text processing if
MB_CUR_MAX
> 1, and by using
strcoll(3),
wcscoll(3) or
strxfrm(3),
wcsxfrm(3) to compare strings.
RETURN VALUE¶
A successful call to
setlocale() returns an opaque string that
corresponds to the locale set. This string may be allocated in static storage.
The string returned is such that a subsequent call with that string and its
associated category will restore that part of the process's locale. The return
value is NULL if the request cannot be honored.
C89, C99, POSIX.1-2001.
SEE ALSO¶
locale(1),
localedef(1),
isalpha(3),
localeconv(3),
nl_langinfo(3),
rpmatch(3),
strcoll(3),
strftime(3),
charsets(7),
locale(7)
COLOPHON¶
This page is part of release 3.74 of the Linux
man-pages project. A
description of the project, information about reporting bugs, and the latest
version of this page, can be found at
http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.
