SETLOCALE(3) Linux Programmers Manual SETLOCALE(3)
NAME
setlocale - set the current locale
SYNOPSIS
#include
char *setlocale(int category, const char *locale);
DESCRIPTION
The setlocale() function is used to set or query the programs current
locale.
If locale is not NULL, the programs current locale is modified accord
ing to the arguments. The argument category determines which parts of
the programs 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, con
version, case-sensitive comparison, and wide character func
tions.
LC_MESSAGES
for localizable natural-language messages.
LC_MONETARY
for monetary formatting.
LC_NUMERIC
for number formatting (such as the decimal point and the thou
sands 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 implementa
tion-dependent. For glibc, first (regardless of category), the envi
ronment 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 set
locale() returns NULL.
The locale "C" or "POSIX" is a portable locale; its LC_CTYPE part cor
responds to the 7-bit ASCII character set.
A locale name is typically of the form language[_territory][.code
set][@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
multi-byte 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 corre
sponds to the locale set. This string may be allocated in static stor
age. The string returned is such that a subsequent call with that
string and its associated category will restore that part of the pro
cesss locale. The return value is NULL if the request cannot be hon
ored.
CONFORMING TO
C89, C99, POSIX.1-2001.
NOTES
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.
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 3.05 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 1999-07-04 SETLOCALE(3)
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