Sys.setlocale
Set or Get Locale-Specific Information
Description
Set or get aspects of the locale for the engine process. Find details of the numerical
and monetary representations in the current locale.
Usage
Sys.setlocale(category="LC_ALL", locale="")
Sys.getlocale(category="LC_ALL")
Sys.localeconv()
Arguments
| category |
character string. Must be one of "LC_ALL", "LC_CTYPE",
"LC_NUMERIC", "LC_TIME", "LC_COLLATE",
"LC_MONETARY", "LC_MESSAGES", "LC_PAPER",
"LC_NAME", "LC_ADDRESS", "LC_TELEPHONE",
"LC_MEASUREMENT", or "LC_IDENTIFICATION".
"LC_ALL" means the collection of all the others.
|
| locale |
character string. A valid locale name. The default, "", means
the default locale for your system and "C" means the locale used
by the C language. Other valid values are system specific.
|
Details
The current engine locale determines which characters are considered
printable or alphabetic, the format of numerals and dates, and the
collating sequence of characters. Most output and input functions
respect the locale setting.
One exception is the parse and deparse functions for
reading and writing the language syntax, which is independent of the
locale. Also, object serialization does not depend on the locale, in an
effort to produce files that may be read on any system.
The engine initially sets each locale category by reading the following
environment variables in order, and using the first variable that is
set: First, "LC_ALL". Second, the category name (such as
"LC_COLLATE"). Third, "LANG". If none of these
environment variables are set, the locale value is "en_US". The same
logic is used to set the default locale value when Sys.setlocale
is called with locale="".
One exception to the above is the "LC_NUMERIC" locale category,
which is initially set to "C". This category can only be changed
by explicitly calling Sys.setlocale is called with
category="LC_NUMERIC".
Spotfire Enterprise Runtime for R accepts locales such as "en_US" (for the English-language
locale in the Unites States) or "fr_FR" (for the French-language
locale in France). These locales have a two-letter lowercase language
code (using the ISO-639 standard), and a two-letter uppercase country
code (using the ISO-3166 standard). On Windows, the engine also accepts
longer locale names such as "English_United States.1252" or
"French_France.1252". Unknown locale names may be accepted, but
the engine will interpret them the same as the default locale.
Spotfire Enterprise Runtime for R uses the current
"LC_TIME" locale when parsing or writing
dates (see
format.Date), to determine the appropriate
words for the days of the weeks and the months.
Sys.localeconv currently returns a fixed list of values,
regardless of the locale values.
Value
Sys.setlocale returns a string describing the current
locale after setting it to what you asked for.
Sys.getlocale returns a string describing the current locale. If
the category argument is "LC_ALL", it returns
a string describing the locales for each of the categories. If the
category argument is not "LC_ALL", it returns the single
locale string for that category, which is suitable for input as the
locale argument to Sys.setlocale().
Sys.localeconv returns a character vector with names
describing various aspects of how to format numbers and money in the
current locale. E.g., the "decimal_point" element tells whether
the decimal point symbol is a period or comma and the "int_curr_symbol"
gives the international currency abbreviation for the local currency.
Examples
## Get current locale information for all categories
Sys.getlocale()
## Get current locale for the LC_CTYPE category
Sys.getlocale("LC_CTYPE")
## Not run:
## Set default locale from the operating system
Sys.setlocale(locale="")
## Set locale for all categories to "C"
Sys.setlocale(locale="C")
## turn off locale-specific sorting
Sys.setlocale(cat = "LC_COLLATE", locale = "C")
## End(Not run)
## Find details of the numerical and monetary representations in
## the current locale
Sys.localeconv()