elisp: Locales
32.12 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)’ for the default paper size
measured in millimeters (locale items ‘PAPER_WIDTH’ and
‘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’. 
(libc)Locales, for more information about locales and locale
items.
Info Catalog
elisp: Input Methods
elisp: Non-ASCII Characters