Render a reprex in a specific locale

Render a reprex(), with control over the localization of error messages and aspects of the locale. Note that these are related but distinct issues! Typical usage is for someone on a Spanish system to create a reprex that is easier for an English-speaking audience to follow.

Usage

reprex_locale(..., language = "en", locale = NULL)

Arguments

...

Inputs passed through to reprex().

language

A string specifying the preferred language for messages. It is enacted via the LANGUAGE environment variable, for the duration of the reprex() call. Examples: "en" for English and "fr" for French. See Details for more.

locale

A named character vector, specifying aspects of the locale, in the Sys.setlocale() sense. It is enacted by setting one or more environment variables, for the duration of the reprex() call. See Details for more.

Value

Character vector of rendered reprex, invisibly.

language

Use the language argument to express the preferred language of error messages. The output of dir(system.file(package = "translations")) may provide some helpful ideas. The language should generally follow "XPG syntax": a two-letter language code, optionally followed by other modifiers.

Examples: "en", "de", "en_GB", "pt_BR".

locale

Use the locale argument only if you want to affect something like how day-of-the-week or month is converted to character. You are less likely to need to set this than the language argument. You may have more success setting specific categories, such as "LC_TIME", than multi-category shortcuts like "LC_ALL" or "LANG". The locale values must follow the format dictated by your operating system and the requested locale must be installed. On *nix systems, locale -a is a good way to see which locales are installed. Note that the format for locale and language are different from each other on Windows.

Examples: "en_CA.UTF-8" (macOS), "French_France.1252" (Windows).

See also

• The Locale Names section of the GNU C docs, for more about XPG syntax

• The Internationalization and Localization section of the R Installation and Administration manual

Examples

if (FALSE) {

# if all you want to do is make sure messages are in English
reprex_locale("a" / 2)

# change messages to a specific language
reprex_locale(
  {
    "a" / 2
  },
  language = "it"
)

reprex_locale(
  {
    "a" / 2
  },
  language = "fr_CA"
)

reprex_locale(
  {
    "a" / 2
  },
  language = "pt_BR"
)

# get day-of-week and month to print in French (not Windows)
reprex_locale(
  {
    format(as.Date(c("2019-01-01", "2019-02-01")), "%a %b %d")
  },
  locale = c(LC_TIME = "fr_FR")
)

# get day-of-week and month to print in French (Windows)
# assumes that the relevant language is installed on the system
# LC_TIME can also be specified as "French" or "French_France" here
reprex_locale(
  {
    format(as.Date(c("2019-01-01", "2019-02-01")), "%a %b %d")
  },
  locale = c(LC_TIME = "French_France.1252")
)
}