Manpages - setlocale.3
Table of Contents
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” (see *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, and then:
- using the values returned from a *localeconv*(3) call for locale-dependent information;
- using the multibyte and wide character functions for text processing if MB_CUR_MAX > 1;
- using *strcoll*(3) and *strxfrm*(3) to compare strings; and
- using *wcscoll*(3) and *wcsxfrm*(3) to compare wide-character 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.
The C standards specify only the categories LC_ALL, LC_COLLATE, LC_CTYPE, LC_MONETARY, LC_NUMERIC, and LC_TIME. POSIX.1 adds LC_MESSAGES. The remaining categories are GNU extensions.
SEE ALSO
*locale*(1), *localedef*(1), *isalpha*(3), *localeconv*(3), *nl_langinfo*(3), *rpmatch*(3), *strcoll*(3), *strftime*(3), *charsets*(7), *locale*(7)
COLOPHON
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