| NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | RETURN VALUE | CONFORMING TO | NOTES | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON | The Linux Programming Interface |
SETLOCALE(3) Linux Programmer's Manual SETLOCALE(3)
setlocale - set the current locale
#include <locale.h>
char *setlocale(int category, const char *locale);
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.
LC_ALL for all of the locale.
LC_COLLATE
for regular expression matching (it determines the meaning of
range expressions and equivalence classes) and string
collation.
LC_CTYPE
for regular expression matching, character classification,
conversion, case-sensitive comparison, and wide character
functions.
LC_MESSAGES
for localizable natural-language messages.
LC_MONETARY
for monetary formatting.
LC_NUMERIC
for number formatting (such as the decimal point and the
thousands separator).
LC_TIME
for time and date formatting.
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 "", 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 (LC_COLLATE, LC_CTYPE,
LC_MESSAGES, LC_MONETARY, LC_NUMERIC, LC_TIME) 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.
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.
Linux (that is, glibc) supports the portable locales "C" and "POSIX".
In the good old days there used to be support for the European
Latin-1 "ISO-8859-1" locale (e.g., in libc-4.5.21 and libc-4.6.27),
and the Russian "KOI-8" (more precisely, "koi-8r") locale (e.g., in
libc-4.6.27), so that having an environment variable
LC_CTYPE=ISO-8859-1 sufficed to make isprint(3) return the right
answer. These days non-English speaking Europeans have to work a bit
harder, and must install actual locale files.
locale(1), localedef(1), isalpha(3), localeconv(3), nl_langinfo(3),
rpmatch(3), strcoll(3), strftime(3), charsets(7), locale(7)
This page is part of release 3.51 of the Linux man-pages project. A
description of the project, and information about reporting bugs, can
be found at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.
GNU 2008-12-05 SETLOCALE(3)
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