SETLOCALE
Section: Linux Programmer's Manual (3)
Updated: 2017-09-15
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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;
it exists on all conforming systems.
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.
ATTRIBUTES
For an explanation of the terms used in this section, see
attributes(7).
| Interface | Attribute | Value
|
|
setlocale()
| Thread safety | MT-Unsafe const:locale env
|
CONFORMING TO
POSIX.1-2001, POSIX.1-2008, C89, C99.
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 4.13 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
https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.
Index
- NAME
-
- SYNOPSIS
-
- DESCRIPTION
-
- RETURN VALUE
-
- ATTRIBUTES
-
- CONFORMING TO
-
- SEE ALSO
-
- COLOPHON
-
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