Locale Settings for MATLAB Process

The locale setting defines the language of your user interface and the display formats for information like time, date, and currency. MATLAB^® uses the user-specified locale on all platforms.

If MATLAB does not correctly display characters in your language, you might have a locale setting problem. Locale is composed of individual settings which you can control. Each platform uses different parameters to specify the locale setting. The following terms are relevant to understanding locale settings.

• locale — Format: language_territory.codeset

  For example, for the U.S. English locale setting en_US.US-ASCII, en means that the display language is English. US indicates that time and date displays use U.S. conventions. US-ASCII is the coded character set (codeset) used to display text.

• character set — Set of characters that make up a language used by a region. The MATLAB supported character set is the character set specified by the user locale setting.

• codeset — Abbreviation for coded character set. A set of characters with a unique numerical value assigned to each character.

• encoding — Scheme for assigning numerical values to a character set to create a codeset.

• 7-bit ASCII — Either the codeset or the characters contained in that codeset. There are 128 characters, which include letters, digits, symbols, control characters, and graphics characters. The term ASCII in MathWorks^® documentation is the same as 7-bit ASCII.

• Unicode — Character codeset. Excerpt from the unicode.org website: “Unicode^® provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language.”

• user locale setting — Setting on your computer that specifies the locale that you want to use when running MATLAB. If your user-specified locale is not supported, MATLAB uses the default locale en_US_POSIX.US-ASCII.

• system locale setting — Setting on Microsoft^® Windows^® platforms. The user locale and system locale must be the same value. If these values are not the same, you might see garbled text or incorrectly displayed characters.

• i18n — Short for the word internationalization, where 18 stands for the number of letters between the letters i and n.

Default Locale Setting

MATLAB does not support every locale setting. If the user-specified locale is unsupported, MATLAB uses the default locale en_US_POSIX.US-ASCII, also known as C locale.

Supported Character Set

MATLAB supports the character set specified by the user locale setting.

Platform-Specific Localized Formats for Current Folder Browser

In the Current Folder Browser, MATLAB usually uses platform-neutral localized formats and rules. You can, however, use the operating system short date format to control the format for displaying file date and time data.

Related Topics

• Set Locale on Windows Platforms
• Set Locale on Mac Platforms
• Set Locale on Linux Platforms