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33.12 Locales

In POSIX, locales control which language to use in language-related features. These Emacs variables control how Emacs interacts with these features.

variable locale-coding-system​

This variable specifies the coding system to use for decoding system error messages and—on X Window system only—keyboard input, for sending batch output to the standard output and error streams, for encoding the format argument to format-time-string, and for decoding the return value of format-time-string.

variable system-messages-locale​

This variable specifies the locale to use for generating system error messages. Changing the locale can cause messages to come out in a different language or in a different orthography. If the variable is nil, the locale is specified by environment variables in the usual POSIX fashion.

variable system-time-locale​

This variable specifies the locale to use for formatting time values. Changing the locale can cause messages to appear according to the conventions of a different language. If the variable is nil, the locale is specified by environment variables in the usual POSIX fashion.

function locale-info item​

This function returns locale data item for the current POSIX locale, if available. item should be one of these symbols:

codeset​

Return the character set as a string (locale item CODESET).

days​

Return a 7-element vector of day names (locale items DAY_1 through DAY_7);

months​

Return a 12-element vector of month names (locale items MON_1 through MON_12).

paper​

Return a list (width height) of 2 integers, for the default paper size measured in millimeters (locale items _NL_PAPER_WIDTH and _NL_PAPER_HEIGHT).

If the system can’t provide the requested information, or if item is not one of those symbols, the value is nil. All strings in the return value are decoded using locale-coding-system. See Locales in The GNU Libc Manual, for more information about locales and locale items.