I am interested in the weekday of this datetime and I want it to be in English – regardless of the computer executing the command.
My real problem is a computer where some settings are in Danish and where I do not have sufficient privileges to change them.
Locale
Some results in R are printed based on the locale on the computer.
For time related printing this is set by LC_TIME.
On my English computer the value is
Sys.getlocale("LC_TIME")
## [1] "en_DK.UTF-8"
On my Danish computer the value is “Danish_Denmark.1252”.
The base R command weekdays rely on LC_TIME and on my Danish computer I get this weekday:
> weekdays(t)
[1] "lørdag"
Lubridate
I find the function wday from the lubridate package to be a more flexible alternative because the value of locale can be set as an argument.
On my English computer I don’t need to set the locale:
lubridate::wday(t, label = TRUE, abbr = FALSE, week_start = 1)
## [1] Saturday
## 7 Levels: Monday < Tuesday < Wednesday < Thursday < Friday < ... < Sunday
On my Danish computer the output is
> lubridate::wday(t, label = TRUE, abbr = FALSE, week_start = 1)
[1] lørdag
Levels: mandag < tirsdag < onsdag < torsdag < fredag < lørdag < søndag
With sufficient permissions it should be possible to set the locale to a variant of English, but unfortunately I get in trouble on my Danish computer:
> lubridate::wday(t, label = TRUE, abbr = FALSE, week_start = 1, locale = "English United States")
Fejl i Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME", locale) :
(konverteret fra advarsel) OS reports request to set locale to "English United States" cannot be honored
I have to rely on something really old school:
lubridate::wday(t, label = TRUE, abbr = FALSE, week_start = 1, locale = "C")
## [1] Saturday
## 7 Levels: Monday < Tuesday < Wednesday < Thursday < Friday < ... < Sunday