How to Change the Locale of R

Change system locale permanently

You could create or edit .Rprofile, at user's level, or at project's level, see.

For all R sessions (and hence RStudio sessions), this should work:

file.edit(file.path("~", ".Rprofile"))

add in .Rprofile:

Sys.setlocale("LC_ALL","English")

How to change language settings in R

You can set this using the Sys.setenv() function. My R session defaults to English, so I'll set it to French and then back again:

> Sys.setenv(LANG = "fr")
> 2 + x
Erreur : objet 'x' introuvable
> Sys.setenv(LANG = "en")
> 2 + x
Error: object 'x' not found

A list of the abbreviations can be found here.

Sys.getenv() gives you a list of all the environment variables that are set.

change time locale for R

For Windows:

Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME", "English")

Best practice: Should I try to change to UTF-8 as locale or is it safe to leave it as is?

This is not a perfect answer but a good workaround: As Roland pointed out, it might be dangerous to change the locale. So leave it as is. If you have a file and you run into trouble, just search for non-UTF8 encoding as discribed here for RStudio. What I saw, most Editors have such a feature.

Furthermore, this answer gives more insight in what you can do in case you source() a file.

For a way to deal with locales when collations play a crucial part see here

How to set the default language of date in R

OK, as a Q&A site, it seems an answer is required. From your description, it appears to be the issue of your locales. Read ?locales for more.

You can have a test with this (read ?strptime for various format, and pay special attention to those sensitive to locales):

format(Sys.Date(), format = "%Y-%b-%d")
# [1] "2016- 9月-06"

The output has the month in Chinese. If I want to change the display, I need to set "LC_TIME" locale to "C":

Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME", "C")

Then it is OK:

format(Sys.Date(), "%Y-%b-%d")
# [1] "2016-Sep-06"

Every time you start a new R session, you get back to native setting. Should you want a permanent change, put

.First <- function() {
   Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME", "C")
   }

in the $(R RHOME)/etc/Rprofile.site file. Read ?Startup for how to customize R startup and the use of .First.

Set locale to system default UTF-8

Answering my own question: On Ubuntu the default LANG is defined in /etc/default/locale:

jeroen@dev:~⟫ cat /etc/default/locale
# Created by cloud-init v. 0.7.7 on Wed, 29 Jun 2016 11:02:51 +0000
LANG="en_US.UTF-8"

So in R we could do something like:

readRenviron("/etc/default/locale")
LANG <- Sys.getenv("LANG")
if(nchar(LANG))
   Sys.setlocale("LC_ALL", LANG)

Apache also has a line in /etc/apache2/envvars that can be uncommented to enable this.

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