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Google Analytics displays statistics depending on user's language.

I have visitors whose locale is en-us (english), fr (french), but also c. What does this c language code stands for ?

I took a look at reference tables here and here but could not find c.

Thanks in advance !

Arnaud
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3 Answers3

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The only locale names you can count on finding on all operating systems are these three standard ones:

  • "C"
    This is the standard C locale. The attributes and behavior it provides are specified in the ISO C standard. When your program starts up, it initially uses this locale by default.
  • "POSIX"
    This is the standard POSIX locale. Currently, it is an alias for the standard C locale.
  • ""
    The empty name says to select a locale based on environment variables. See Locale Categories.
Mr Lister
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Jharwood
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  • Thanks for your answer. Do you have any hypothesis what are these website visitors with "C" locale ? I thought most browsers would have a locale set by default. Are these visitors robots ? – Arnaud May 31 '12 at 10:49
  • most likely, they are either Web crawlers, or Linux users, i wouldn't know unless i could see the page – Jharwood May 31 '12 at 10:52
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In my case, that was bots.

The network domain was either kimsufi, amazonaws, or not set ....

Always the same pages viewed, and always direct trafic.

If I were you, I would check these other dimensions.

Richard Ev
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Antoine Tissier
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2

Language codes are sent by the client, to the server, so that the server may return specific page information based upon this (such as translated pages). It seems though, that Google Analytics may not check for validity of these language codes before adding them to your charts.

For example, I have at least one language codes in the form *30789a483078979530789a5830789a2c307898a4 visible in my data.

Further analysis of the few of c language-code visitors visible in the information from my website, it appears that they all originate from Linux OS (or undefined), and all use Safari or are part of a script getting data from a webpage (one in particular was http://pagepeeker.com )

Despite the language, the requests originate from all over the world.

In summary, I think it's just invalid data that's being sent to GA, and should probably be ignored.

Death
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