t...@sss.pgh.pa.us wrote:

> Bryn wrote:
> 
>> It’s easy to guess values for, say, countries in Europe:
> 
> On Unix-ish systems, "locale -a" should provide the set of available values.  
> We don't attempt to document this because it's so installation-dependent.
> 
>> But what do I use for, say, Simplified Chinese?
> 
> Maybe you don't have a suitable locale installed.
> 
>> The obvious search (LC_TIME in the search box of the PG doc for the current 
>> version) gets no useful hits.
> 
> The main entry for lc_time in
> 
> 19.11.2. Locale and Formatting: 
> https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-client.html#RUNTIME-CONFIG-CLIENT-FORMAT
>  
> 
> says “Acceptable values are system-dependent; see Section 23.1 for more 
> information", and if you follow that link, you'll read
> 
>    What locales are available on your system under what names depends on what 
> was provided by the operating system vendor and what was
>    installed. On most Unix systems, the command `locale -a` will provide a 
> list of available locales.
> 
> Not sure what more we could say.

Thanks for the quick reply, Tom. `locale -a` showed that I do have a suitable 
locale installed. When I add an extra paragraph to my code that starts with 
`set lc_time = 'zh_CN’;`, I get this:

 星期一 / 九月
 一 03- 9-1042 12:00:00.543216 BC

What looks like an m-dash is actually the Chinese character for “one” as in 
“星期一” (lit. “week-one” which is the convention they adopted when they adopted 
the Western Calendar). Had I picked Friday (“星期五”) the output would have been 
nicer.

About “ Not sure what more we could say”, no… I don’t suppose there’s a 
cost-effective next step. In an ideal world, you’d have O/S-dependent code that 
reads the output of `locale -a`, sanitizes it to get the legal arguments for 
`set lc_time`, and presents it as a relation.

My problem is that doc search only gets me so far. Then I have to read each 
whole page from top to bottom to find the nuggets—in this case “ Acceptable 
values are system-dependent”.



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