Set locale to system default UTF-8

Question

When running R inside rApache, the locale is inherited from the Apache webserver, and therefore Sys.getlocale() is always equal to "C". I would like my web application to use UTF8, so I use:

Sys.setlocale("LC_ALL", 'en_US.UTF-8')

However this doesn't work on machines that do not have this locale available:

1: Setting LC_CTYPE failed, using "C" 
2: Setting LC_COLLATE failed, using "C" 
3: Setting LC_TIME failed, using "C" 
4: Setting LC_MESSAGES failed, using "C" 
5: Setting LC_MONETARY failed, using “C”

Is there any way to use Sys.setlocale to set the locale to the system default UTF-8? I.e. something that would also work on Windows or a German Linux?

Set locale to system default UTF-8

3 Answers