Get weekdays in English in R

Question

I am using R outside the US and I got everything working in English, but the result of weekdays() is still in Spanish:

Day <- seq(as.Date("2013-06-01"), by=1, len=30)
weekdays(Day)
[1] "sábado"    "domingo"   "lunes"     "martes"    "miércoles"  (...)

Any ideas on how to get the weekdays in English?

That is caused by your locale setting in Linux/UNIX Try: (Sys.setenv("LANGUAGE"="En"). I assume the same works in Windows, but I do not know first hand. — jim mcnamara, Jun 10 '13 at 19:13
Thank you jim mcnamara, I am using Ubuntu but even after the Sys.setenv I still get the weeekdays() in Spanish! — Renne007, Jun 10 '13 at 19:15
Does this work: `Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME", "en_US"); weekdays(Sys.Date()+0:6)`? — Josh O'Brien, Jun 10 '13 at 19:18
Thank you Josh O'Brien, this is what I get: Warning message: In Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME", "en_US") : OS reports request to set locale to "en_US" cannot be honored — Renne007, Jun 10 '13 at 19:22

score 26 · Accepted Answer · edited Mar 20 '20 at 05:58

26

Printing of Date and POSIX*t objects seems to be controlled by the LC_TIME locale category.

On Windows, you change it like this:

## First, save the current value so we can restore it later
Sys.getlocale("LC_TIME")
# [1] "English_United States.1252"

## First in Spanish
Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME","Spanish Modern Sort")
# [1] "Spanish_Spain.1252"
weekdays(Sys.Date()+0:6)
# [1] "lunes"     "martes"    "miércoles" "jueves"    "viernes"   "sábado"   
# [7] "domingo"  

## Then back to (US) English
Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME","English United States")
# [1] "English_United States.1252"
weekdays(Sys.Date()+0:6)
# [1] "Monday"    "Tuesday"   "Wednesday" "Thursday"  "Friday"    "Saturday" 
# [7] "Sunday"

On most *NIXes, the equivalent would be:

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

The particular locale names are OS-dependent, as mentioned in ?Sys.setlocale. For names accepted by Windows, see here. For names accepted by Linux, see here.

edited Mar 20 '20 at 05:58

r2evans

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answered Jun 10 '13 at 19:21

Josh O'Brien

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as a restricted user, this doesn't work for me on either windows or linux - "OS reports request ... cannot be honored" – eddi Jun 10 '13 at 19:25
It may be a different argument to `Sys.setlocale`. On a Mac the back-to-English argument is "en_US.UTF-8". – IRTFM Jun 10 '13 at 19:27
Thank you all! I believe this works in Ubuntu: > Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME", "C") – Renne007 Jun 10 '13 at 19:31
1

@eddi -- That's just the error message I get when I use an invalid name for the locale... Out of curiosity, what do you get when you type `Sys.getlocale("LC_TIME")`? Also, does this work, or does it give you an error: `Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME", Sys.getlocale("LC_TIME"))`? – Josh O'Brien Jun 10 '13 at 19:38
I see, thanks. I don't get an error with that last expression, and my locale on linux is "C" and is "English_United States.1252" on windows. On windows "Spanish Modern Sort" or "Spanish_Modern_Sort" don't work, but e.g. "Spanish_Argentina" works. I guess it has to do with peculiarities of the OS setup. – eddi Jun 10 '13 at 19:43

score 13 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 10 '14 at 17:09

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

did the trick for me. Also this don't bring us OS reports request to set locale to "EN" cannot be honored error message.

answered Sep 10 '14 at 17:09

dainys

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score 12 · Answer 3 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:46

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From my answer here, you can get weekdays in English without messing with locales like this:

c("Sunday", "Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday", "Thursday", 
  "Friday", "Saturday")[as.POSIXlt(Day)$wday + 1]

edited May 23 '17 at 11:46

Community

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answered Jun 10 '13 at 20:11

GSee

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are you sure this isn't locale dependent? the weekday doesn't start on Sunday in all countries – eddi Jun 10 '13 at 23:30
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@eddi, I'm pretty sure because `POSIXlt` is based on [struct tm](http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/ctime/tm/) and `tm_wday` is "days since Sunday" ... edit: and because `?POSIXlt` says `wday` is "0-6 day of the week, starting on Sunday." – GSee Jun 10 '13 at 23:33
list_wday_en <- c("Sun", "Mon", "Tue", "Wed", "Thu", "Fri", "Sat") wday_now <- list_wday_en[wday(now())] – Andrii Apr 18 '20 at 17:10

score 9 · Answer 4 · answered Aug 06 '14 at 21:47

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Under windows RStudio

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

That was the only thing that worked for me.

answered Aug 06 '14 at 21:47

EdgarGithub

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score 2 · Answer 5 · answered Jun 04 '15 at 09:38

I faced the very same problem trying to change the locale from es_ES to en_US (both UTF-8).

R message is given by R main workspace, as it cannot change system locale. If code is inserted into an R-script a new workspace (the running one) is created, and locale can be overriden.

In my code I included the following lines:

curr_locale <- Sys.getlocale("LC_TIME")
Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME","en_US.UTF-8")

#<specific code for graph generation>

Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME",curr_locale)

That made the change!

score 1 · Answer 6 · answered Mar 01 '20 at 19:42

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How about this:

dev_null <- Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME", "english")

answered Mar 01 '20 at 19:42

Donatoris

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How does that differ from the answer by @EdgarGithub? – MrBean Bremen Mar 01 '20 at 20:03
It will not cause this warning: Warning message: In Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME", "english") : OS reports request to set locale to "en_US" cannot be honored @MrBeanBremen – Donatoris Mar 03 '20 at 14:11

score 1 · Answer 7 · answered May 28 '22 at 02:19

I personally prefer not to modify Sys settings. An alternative solution using the clock package would be:

Date <- seq(as.Date("2013-06-01"), by = 1, len = 30)

# string representation
as.character(clock::date_weekday_factor(Date))

# factor representation
factor(clock::date_weekday_factor(Date, encoding = "iso"), ordered = F)

Get weekdays in English in R

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