How to change the locale of R?

Question

I’m using R version 2.15.3 (2013-03-01) on Ubuntu 12.10. The System is in German and so is R. This comes unhandy when searching for error messages.

Executing R in xterm this way $ LANG="C" R partially solves the issue. Then R displays everything in English. But when loading RStudio this way, the R interpreter is still in German. So I’m looking for a way to change the locale of R in R itself.

I found this: How to change language settings in R, but Sys.setenv(LANG = "en") does’t work for me:

2+x
# Fehler: Objekt 'x' nicht gefunden
Sys.setenv(LANG = "en")
2+x
# Fehler: Objekt 'x' nicht gefunden

I also tried Sys.setenv(LANG = "en_US.UTF-8") with no success.

Output of Sys.getlocale()

Sys.getlocale()
# [1] "LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=de_DE.UTF-8;
# LC_COLLATE=de_DE.UTF-8;LC_MONETARY=de_DE.UTF-8;LC_MESSAGES=de_DE.UTF-8;
# LC_PAPER=C;LC_NAME=C;LC_ADDRESS=C;LC_TELEPHONE=C;LC_MEASUREMENT=de_DE.UTF-8;
# LC_IDENTIFICATION=C"

(linebrakes added for convenience)

Answer 1

Just had the same problem and found the solution that worked for me on Windows/Linux:

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