[R] Help with setting locale

David Winsemius
2018-09-14T15:44:56Z

> On Sep 14, 2018, at 1:02 AM, Kim Titcombe <ktitcombe02 at gmail.com>
wrote:
>
> *Query or Set Aspects of the Locale*
>
> I have an issue with setting LOCALE in installation (new  installation on
> new computer but have installed and used R before).
>
> I am based in Switzerland but work in English (Windows in English), hence
> want English as default.
>
> Console contains following message:
>
> # During startup - Warning message:
>
> # Setting LC_CTYPE= failed
>
> -------------------------------------------------
>
> Solutions I tried found on ?help? and in R manual as follows?.
>
> # Sys.getlocale(category = ?LC_ALL?)
>
> 1]
>
"LC_COLLATE=English_Switzerland.65001;LC_CTYPE=C;LC_MONETARY=English_Switzerland.65001;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=English_Switzerland.65001"
>
> # Sys.setlocale(category=?LC_ALL?, locale = ? ?)
>
> or
>
> # Sys.setlocale(category=?LC_ALL?, local=?Switzerland.65001?)
>
> Output
>
> # OS reports request to set locale to "Switzerland.65001" cannot
be honoured
>
> Tried various commands specific for 'LC_CTYPE' (as this is where
> installation failed) for language string such as
>
> # Sys.setlocale("LC_CTYPE","en-GB")

You may get better results with an underscore rather than a dash.

Try:

Sys.setlocale("LC_CTYPE","en_GB")



On my machine you can get the acceptable locale strings with:

locales <- system("locale -a", intern = TRUE)
locales[ grep("GB",locales) ]  # Just the GB strings
[1] "en_GB"            "en_GB.ISO8859-1"
"en_GB.ISO8859-15" "en_GB.US-ASCII"
"en_GB.UTF-8"      "zh_CN.GB18030"
"zh_CN.GB2312"
[8] "zh_CN.GBK"



>
> Output:
>
> In Sys.setlocale("LC_CTYPE", "en-GB") :
>
>  OS reports request to set locale to "en-GB" cannot be honoured
>
> Would anyone have any further suggestions for correct command.
>
> With thanks
>
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
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David Winsemius
Alameda, CA, USA

'Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.'
-Gehm's Corollary to Clarke's Third Law