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setlocale

Section: C Library Functions (3)
Updated: 202-0-08
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NAME

setlocale - set the current locale

LIBRARY

Standard C library (libc,~-lc)

SYNOPSIS

#include <locale.h>
char *setlocale(int category, const char *_Nullable 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 geograph-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 natura-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 wel-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, [dq][dq], each part of the locale that should be modified is set according to the environment variables. The details are implementatio-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 [dq]C[dq] or [dq]POSIX[dq] 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 [dq]C[dq] locale is selected as default. A program may be made portable to all locales by calling: setlocale(LC_ALL, ""); after program initialization, and then:

[bu]: using the values returned from a localeconv(3) call for local-dependent information;
[bu]: using the multibyte and wide character functions for text processing if MB_CUR_MAX > 1;
[bu]: using strcoll(3) and strxfrm(3) to compare strings; and
[bu]: using wcscoll(3) and wcsxfrm(3) to compare wid-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.