Setting java locale settings

Question

When I use the default java locale on my linux machine it comes out with the US locale settings, where do I change this so that it comes out with the correct locale?

Cade

Locale.getavailablelocale() method is not returning en_MY, why so? it returns 155 locales – Wondrous

@kekan : Try Locale.getDefault(); – Doggett

Beware of Java 7 default locale changes. – Musket

Possible duplicate of how do I set the default locale for my JVM? – Musket

Answer 1

I believe java gleans this from the environment variables in which it was launched, so you'll need to make sure your LANG and LC_* environment variables are set appropriately.

The locale manpage has full info on said environment variables.

Heliochrome

What are the LC_* environment variables ? – Bonaire

If your program formats numbers, you probably want to set LC_ALL. See my answer below. – Pensile

Be aware that this is incomplete. I'm running macOS Sierra and have LANG as well as LC_ALL set as "en_US.UTF8". However, for some reason Java comes up with user.language=en, user.country=US and user.country.format=DE. – Scribe

Answer 2

With the user.language, user.country and user.variant properties.

Example:

java -Duser.language=th -Duser.country=TH -Duser.variant=TH SomeClass

Houselights

This will work, but it's safer and more future-proof to set the environment and let the JRE figure out the correct values for these. – Ashy

The problem is that it is not working @Air... My Mac JDK environment is not able to connect any system environment variable to the locale... Only using props (JVM properties)... – Notebook

Answer 3

I had to control this in a script that ran on a machine with French locale, but a specific Java program had to run with en_US. As already pointed out, the following works:

java -Duser.language=en -Duser.country=US ...

Alternatively,

LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 java ...

I prefer the latter.

Pensile

Answer 4

If you ever want to check what locale or character set java is using this is built into the JVM:

java -XshowSettings -version

and it will dump out loads of the settings it's using. This way you can check your LANG and LC_* values are getting picked up correctly.

Muscle

Hmm, that gives me a "default locale", "default display locale" and "default format locale"... what the heck is the difference though? – Thies

Very nice trick! Thank you for sharing! It is useful when you have distroless container with no shell and only java command. – Cutter

Answer 5

You could call during init or whatever Locale.setDefault() or -Duser.language=, -Duser.country=, and -Duser.variant= at the command line. Here's something on Sun's site.

Barbed

The supported languages are listed at oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/… – Shemikashemite

Answer 6

For tools like jarsigner which is implemented in Java.

JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS=-Duser.language=en jarsigner

Iraqi

This environment works better, just add export JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS=-Duser.language=en in your ~/.profile – Marigraph

See #28328120 – Musket

Finally, this is the option I want! java and javac does not seem to honour LANG and LC_ALL. – Subsellium

Answer 7

You can change on the console:

$ export LANG=en_US.utf8

Interatomic

First, you need to write 'utf-8' instead 'utf8'. Second, only the encoding part works, but not the language part. – Subsellium

Answer 8

If you are on Mac, simply using System Preferences -> Languages and dragging the language to test to top (before English) will make sure the next time you open the App, the right locale is tried!!

Winniewinnifred

Answer 9

On linux, create file in /etc/default/locale with the following contents

LANG=en.utf8

and then use the source command to export this variable by running

source /etc/default/locale

The source command sets the variable permanently.

Impuissant

Answer 10

One way to control the locale settings is to set the java system properties user.language and user.region.

Amphitrite