How to change the language of dates in R

R
R tips
Author

Philippe Massicotte

Published

January 10, 2021

Recently, I had to make a ggplot2 graphic with data that contained dates. Let’s create some sample data with dates.

n <- 10

df <- tibble(
  x = seq(as.Date("2020-01-01"), as.Date("2020-10-10"), length.out = n),
  y = rnorm(n)
)

df
#> # A tibble: 10 × 2
#>    x               y
#>    <date>      <dbl>
#>  1 2020-01-01  0.442
#>  2 2020-02-01 -1.63 
#>  3 2020-03-03 -0.188
#>  4 2020-04-04 -0.565
#>  5 2020-05-05 -0.369
#>  6 2020-06-06  0.569
#>  7 2020-07-07 -0.167
#>  8 2020-08-08  0.404
#>  9 2020-09-08  0.989
#> 10 2020-10-10 -1.24

p <- df %>% 
  ggplot(aes(x = x, y = y)) +
  geom_point() +
  scale_x_date(date_breaks = "6 weeks", date_labels = "%B-%d")

p

My Linux system is configured in English, the dates are also displayed in English in the above graphic. If we want to use another language, we first have to edit the /etc/locale.gen file and un-comment the line(s) for the language(s) we want to use. For this particular example, I wanted to display the dates in French.

sudo nano /etc/locale.gen

My locale.gen configuration file.

In this file, I un-commented the fr_CA.UTF-8 UTF-8 line. Once done, save the file. Then, we have to regenerate the localization files using the locale-gen function.

sudo locale-gen fr_CA.UTF-8

Finally, within R, we can set the locale language with Sys.setlocale(). If we call the plot again, the dates are now displayed in French as expected.

Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME", "fr_CA.UTF-8")
#> [1] "fr_CA.UTF-8"
p

Session info

#> ─ Session info ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
#>  setting  value
#>  version  R version 4.2.1 (2022-06-23)
#>  os       Linux Mint 21
#>  system   x86_64, linux-gnu
#>  ui       X11
#>  language en_CA:en
#>  collate  en_CA.UTF-8
#>  ctype    en_CA.UTF-8
#>  tz       America/Montreal
#>  date     2022-08-10
#>  pandoc   2.18 @ /usr/lib/rstudio/bin/quarto/bin/tools/ (via rmarkdown)
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