• 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.
  

  LC_ALL

  for all of the locale.
  

  LC_COLLATE

  for regular expression matching (it determines the meaning
  of range expressions and equivalence classes) and string collation.
  

  LC_CTYPE

  for regular expression matching, character classification, conversion,
  case-sensitive comparison, and wide character functions.
  

  LC_MESSAGES

  for localizable natural-language messages.
  

  LC_MONETARY

  for monetary formatting.
  

  LC_NUMERIC

  for number formatting (such as the decimal point and the thousands separator).
  

  LC_TIME

  for time and date formatting.
  
  
  
  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
  """""" ,
  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
  LC_CTYPE ,
  LC_MESSAGES ,
  LC_MONETARY ,
  LC_NUMERIC ,
  LC_TIME )
  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; its
  LC_CTYPE part corresponds to the 7-bit ASCII
  character set.
  
  
  
  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 multi-byte 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.
• CONFORMING TO
  
  C89, C99, POSIX.1-2001.
• NOTES
  
  Linux (that is, glibc) supports the portable locales """C""" " and " """POSIX""" . In the good old days there used to be support for the European Latin-1 ISO-8859-1 locale (e.g., in libc-4.5.21 and libc-4.6.27), and the Russian KOI-8 (more precisely, "koi-8r") locale (e.g., in libc-4.6.27), so that having an environment variable LC_CTYPE=ISO-8859-1 sufficed to make isprint(3) return the right answer. These days non-English speaking Europeans have to work a bit harder, and must install actual locale files.
• 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 3.19 of the Linux man-pages project. A description of the project, and information about reporting bugs, can be found at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.

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