# Strftime & strptime bug #27239 is present on all platforms, not just Windows

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/strftime-strptime-bug-27239-is-present-on-all-platforms-not-just-windows/11191>\
**Category:** Internals & Design\
**Tags:** bug\
**Created:** [May 27, 2018, 10:30pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/strftime-strptime-bug-27239-is-present-on-all-platforms-not-just-windows/11191 "2018-05-27T22:30:53Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 3

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**Author:** ![ScottPJones](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/scottpjones/32/146_2.png) [@ScottPJones](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/ScottPJones)\
**Post date:** [May 28, 2018, 6:08am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/strftime-strptime-bug-27239-is-present-on-all-platforms-not-just-windows/11191/3 "2018-05-28T06:08:50Z")

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> [@alkorang](#):
>
> They could be valid `EUC-KR` characters but it does not mean they are valid `UTF-8` .

My point was that calling them “invalid UTF-8” leads people to believe they were _supposed_ to be UTF-8,  
which was not the case at all. The function correctly returned them using `EUC-KR` encoding, based on the setting of `LC_TIME`, as noted in the documentation for the `strftime` and `strptime` functions on the different platforms. Note that these functions are part of the Open Group Unix standard, the Posix standard, as well as the ISO C standard, going back at least 30 years.

Most all of the times over the years I’ve seen people have “corrupted” text data, it’s simply been a case of misidentification, the data was actually valid, it just wasn’t UTF-8.

Since `String` in Julia is supposed to be `UTF-8`, the `strftime` function needs to handle converting whatever the C library `strftime` or `wcsftime` function _correctly_ returned, to the `UTF-8` encoding required by the `String` type.

One solution to the problem is using `wcsftime` / `wcsptime` with `transcode`, however,  
it might be better for Julia to always set it’s locale to a `UTF-8` one (in your case, `ko_KR.UTF-8`).  
That _might_ cause problems for C code that Julia calls, depending on whether they use the locales correctly, but that’s probably not that likely.

> [@alkorang](#):
>
> If I understand correctly, do you meen the problem can also happen in different platforms, not only Windows?

Yes, it’s just that most people on Macs or Linux have `LC_TIME` set to `*.UTF-8`.  
Here is the output from `locale` on my laptop:

```julia
01:02 $ locale
LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

```

What is it on your system? (I hope that Windows has the locale command, if not, you might need to write a little C program to get the setting of `LC_TIME`).

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