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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | RETURN VALUE | ATTRIBUTES | CONFORMING TO | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON |
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.
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.
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.
For an explanation of the terms used in this section, see
attributes(7).
┌────────────┬───────────────┬────────────────────────────┐
│Interface │ Attribute │ Value │
├────────────┼───────────────┼────────────────────────────┤
│setlocale() │ Thread safety │ MT-Unsafe const:locale env │
└────────────┴───────────────┴────────────────────────────┘
POSIX.1-2001, POSIX.1-2008, C89, C99.
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 4.12 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/.
GNU 2015-08-08 SETLOCALE(3)
Pages that refer to this page: apropos(1), groffer(1), localedef(1), man(1), whatis(1), catgets(3), catopen(3), duplocale(3), ecvt(3), getdate(3), gettext(3), isalpha(3), localeconv(3), newlocale(3), nl_langinfo(3), printf(3), rpmatch(3), scanf(3), strcoll(3), strfmon(3), strftime(3), strptime(3), strxfrm(3), toupper(3), uselocale(3), locale(5), locale(7), unicode(7), utf-8(7), lsof(8)