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.\" (c) 1993 by Thomas Koenig (ig25@rz.uni-karlsruhe.de)
.\"
.\" Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this
.\" manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are
.\" preserved on all copies.
.\"
.\" Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this
.\" manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the
.\" entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a
.\" permission notice identical to this one
.\"
.\" Since the Linux kernel and libraries are constantly changing, this
.\" manual page may be incorrect or out-of-date. The author(s) assume no
.\" responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from
.\" the use of the information contained herein. The author(s) may not
.\" have taken the same level of care in the production of this manual,
.\" which is licensed free of charge, as they might when working
.\" professionally.
.\"
.\" Formatted or processed versions of this manual, if unaccompanied by
.\" the source, must acknowledge the copyright and authors of this work.
.\" License.
.\" Modified Sat Jul 24 18:20:12 1993 by Rik Faith (faith@cs.unc.edu)
.\" Modified Tue Jul 15 16:49:10 1997 by Andries Brouwer (aeb@cwi.nl)
.TH SETLOCALE 3 "April 18, 1993" "GNU" "Linux Programmer's Manual"
.SH NAME
setlocale \- set the current locale.
.SH SYNOPSIS
.nf
.B #include <locale.h>
.sp
.BI "char *setlocale(int " category ", const char * " locale ");"
.fi
.SH DESCRIPTION
The
.B setlocale()
function is used to set or query the program's current locale.
If
.I locale
is
.BR """C""" " or " """POSIX""" ,
the current locale is set to the portable locale.
.PP
If
.I locale
is
.BR """""" ,
the locale is set to the default locale which is selected from the
environment variable
.BR LANG .
.PP
On startup of the main program, the portable
.B """C"""
locale is selected as default.
.PP
The argument
.I category
determines which functions are influenced by the new locale:
.TP
.B LC_ALL
for all of the locale.
.TP
.B LC_COLLATE
for the functions
.BR strcoll() " and " strxfrm() .
.TP
.B LC_CTYPE
for the character classification and conversion routines.
.TP
.B LC_MONETARY
for
.BR localeconv() .
.TP
.B LC_NUMERIC
for the decimal character.
.TP
.B LC_TIME
for
.BR strftime() .
.B NULL
if the request cannot not be honored.
This string may be allocated in static storage.
.PP
A program may be made portable to all locales by calling
.B setlocale(LC_ALL, """""")
after program initialization, by using the values returned
from a
.B localeconv()
call
for locale \- dependent information and by using
.B strcoll()
or
.B strxfrm()
to compare strings.
.SH "RETURN VALUE"
A successful call to
.B setlocale()
returns a string that corresponds to the locale set.
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.
.SH "CONFORMING TO"
ANSI C, POSIX.1
.PP
Linux (that is, libc) supports the portable locales
.BR """C""" " and " """POSIX""" .
In the good old days there used to be support for
the European Latin-1
.B """ISO-8859-1"""
locale (e.g. in libc-4.5.21 and libc-4.6.27), and the Russian
.B """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() return the right answer.
These days non-English speaking Europeans have to work a bit harder,
and must install actual locale files.
.PP
The
.B printf()
family of functions may or may not honor the current locale.
.SH "SEE ALSO"
.BR locale "(1), " localedef "(1), " strcoll "(3), " isalpha (3),
.BR localeconv "(3), " strftime "(3), " locale (7)
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