Defines the locale (Country/Region and language) to be used when translating wide-character constants and string literals.

#pragma setlocale( "[locale-string]" )  

Because the algorithm for converting multibyte characters to wide characters may vary by locale or the compilation may take place in a different locale from where an executable file will be run, this pragma provides a way to specify the target locale at compile time. This guarantees that the wide-character strings will be stored in the correct format.

The default locale-string is "".

The "C" locale maps each character in the string to its value as a wchar_t (unsigned short). Other values that are valid for setlocale are those entries that are found in the Language Strings list. For example, you could issue:

#pragma setlocale("dutch")  

The ability to issue a language string depends on the code page and language ID support on your computer.

Pragma Directives and the __Pragma Keyword