| .\" Copyright (c) 1993 by Thomas Koenig (ig25@rz.uni-karlsruhe.de) |
| .\" and Copyright 1999 by Bruno Haible (haible@clisp.cons.org) |
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| .\" Modified Sat Jul 24 18:20:12 1993 by Rik Faith (faith@cs.unc.edu) |
| .\" Modified Tue Jul 15 16:49:10 1997 by Andries Brouwer (aeb@cwi.nl) |
| .\" Modified Sun Jul 4 14:52:16 1999 by Bruno Haible (haible@clisp.cons.org) |
| .\" Modified Tue Aug 24 17:11:01 1999 by Andries Brouwer (aeb@cwi.nl) |
| .\" Modified Tue Feb 6 03:31:55 2001 by Andries Brouwer (aeb@cwi.nl) |
| .\" |
| .TH SETLOCALE 3 2015-08-08 "GNU" "Linux Programmer's Manual" |
| .SH NAME |
| setlocale \- set the current locale |
| .SH SYNOPSIS |
| .nf |
| .B #include <locale.h> |
| .sp |
| .BI "char *setlocale(int " category ", const char *" locale ); |
| .fi |
| .SH DESCRIPTION |
| The |
| .BR setlocale () |
| function is used to set or query the program's current locale. |
| .PP |
| If |
| .I locale |
| is not NULL, |
| the program's current locale is modified according to the arguments. |
| The argument |
| .I category |
| determines which parts of the program's current locale should be modified. |
| .TS |
| lB lB |
| lB l. |
| Category Governs |
| LC_ALL All of the locale |
| LC_ADDRESS T{ |
| Formatting of addresses and |
| .br |
| geography-related items (*) |
| T} |
| LC_COLLATE String collation |
| LC_CTYPE Character classification |
| LC_IDENTIFICATION Metadata describing the locale (*) |
| LC_MEASUREMENT T{ |
| Settings related to measurements |
| .br |
| (metric versus US customary) (*) |
| T} |
| 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 |
| .TE |
| .PP |
| The categories marked with an asterisk in the above table |
| are GNU extensions. |
| For further information on these locale categories, see |
| .BR locale (7). |
| .PP |
| The argument |
| .I locale |
| is a pointer to a character string containing the |
| required setting of |
| .IR 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 |
| .BR setlocale (). |
| .PP |
| If |
| .I locale |
| is an empty string, |
| .BR """""" , |
| 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 |
| .IR category ), |
| the environment variable |
| .B LC_ALL |
| is inspected, |
| next the environment variable with the same name as the category |
| (see the table above), |
| and finally the environment variable |
| .BR LANG . |
| The first existing environment variable is used. |
| If its value is not a valid locale specification, the locale |
| is unchanged, and |
| .BR setlocale () |
| returns NULL. |
| .PP |
| The locale |
| .B """C""" |
| or |
| .B """POSIX""" |
| is a portable locale; |
| it exists on all conforming systems. |
| .PP |
| A locale name is typically of the form |
| .IR language "[_" territory "][." codeset "][@" modifier "]," |
| where |
| .I language |
| is an ISO 639 language code, |
| .I territory |
| is an ISO 3166 country code, and |
| .I codeset |
| is a character set or encoding identifier like |
| .B "ISO-8859-1" |
| or |
| .BR "UTF-8" . |
| For a list of all supported locales, try "locale \-a", cf.\& |
| .BR locale (1). |
| .PP |
| If |
| .I locale |
| is NULL, the current locale is only queried, not modified. |
| .PP |
| On startup of the main program, the portable |
| .B """C""" |
| locale is selected as default. |
| A program may be made portable to all locales by calling: |
| .nf |
| |
| setlocale(LC_ALL, ""); |
| |
| .fi |
| after program initialization, by using the values returned |
| from a |
| .BR localeconv (3) |
| call |
| for locale-dependent information, by using the multibyte and wide |
| character functions for text processing if |
| .BR "MB_CUR_MAX > 1" , |
| and by using |
| .BR strcoll (3), |
| .BR wcscoll (3) |
| or |
| .BR strxfrm (3), |
| .BR wcsxfrm (3) |
| to compare strings. |
| .SH RETURN VALUE |
| A successful call to |
| .BR 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. |
| .SH ATTRIBUTES |
| For an explanation of the terms used in this section, see |
| .BR attributes (7). |
| .TS |
| allbox; |
| lb lb lbw26 |
| l l l. |
| Interface Attribute Value |
| T{ |
| .BR setlocale () |
| T} Thread safety MT-Unsafe const:locale env |
| .TE |
| |
| .SH CONFORMING TO |
| POSIX.1-2001, POSIX.1-2008, C89, C99. |
| .SH SEE ALSO |
| .BR locale (1), |
| .BR localedef (1), |
| .BR isalpha (3), |
| .BR localeconv (3), |
| .BR nl_langinfo (3), |
| .BR rpmatch (3), |
| .BR strcoll (3), |
| .BR strftime (3), |
| .BR charsets (7), |
| .BR locale (7) |