get language of currently logged in user via applescript - macos

Question

I want to get the system language of the currently logged in user. The line
set lang to do shell script "defaults read NSGlobalDomain AppleLanguages"
returns an string, which looks like
(
en,
de,
ja,
fr,
es,
it,
pt,
"pt-PT",
nl,
sv,
nb,
da,
fi,
ru,
pl,
"zh-Hans",
"zh-Hant",
ko,
ar,
cs,
hu,
tr
)
returns the users languages, but how can I get the first one of this 'array'? Is there a possibility to parse this as an array an get its first value?

Answer 1

There's a more direct method. Applescript has a command "system info" which returns a lot of useful information about the current user. Try this to see...
return system info
The information that will help you from that is "user locale". So you can get the language easily...
return user locale of (get system info)
Play around with this on different users and see if it gives you what you want.

Answer 2

The thread is really old, but I just had the problem and this comes up pretty high in a Google search. For other readers, I want to add two comments:
There is a difference between the “return user locale of (get system info)” and the “defaults read NSGlobalDomain AppleLanguages” strategies: The first returns the value from the region settings, the latter the value from the language settings (both in “Language & Text”).
Region settings return a language and a region, separated by underscore. Language settings return either just a language or language and region, separated by hyphen. If you use that in other code, make sure, it is tolerant.
The second point: GREPing works, but the simplest code I found is using the Property List suite from System Events:
on get_language()
set lang to do shell script "defaults read NSGlobalDomain AppleLanguages"
tell application "System Events"
set pl to make new property list item with properties {text:lang}
set r to value of pl
end tell
return item 1 of r
end get_language
grep my be faster, but this requires less brain twisting.
Jürgen

Answer 3

You can use awk and grep to prepare the list a little (get rid of indentation, quotes and parentheses), then split the resulting string:
-- a standard split function
to split of aString by sep
local aList, delims
tell AppleScript
set delims to text item delimiters
set text item delimiters to sep
set aList to text items of aString
set text item delimiters to delims
end tell
return aList
end split
-- pipe the output of defaults through a few more commands
set cmd to "defaults read NSGlobalDomain AppleLanguages | awk '{gsub(/[^a-zA-Z-]/,\"\");print}' | grep -v '^$'"
set langs to do shell script cmd
-- get the first item in the list
set lang to item 1 of (split of langs by return)
The shell command gives you a list like:
en
da
ja
fr
de
es
it
pt
pt-PT
nl
sv
nb
fi
ru
pl
zh-Hans
zh-Hant
ko
So item 1 will be en

Answer 4

By now this thread is ancient, but still the most relevant one of all results to my search entry. So I think this may be relevant to others searching for an answer to this question.
Based on what user1635960 wrote, the following “one liner” appears quite simple to me:
set lang to first word of (do shell script "defaults read NSGlobalDomain AppleLanguages")
As my first system language is German, it simply returns de.
Explanation:
do shell script "defaults read NSGlobalDomain AppleLanguages"
returns a list like
"(
\"de-DE\",
\"nl-DE\",
\"en-DE\"
)"
The class word defines a sequence of mainly letters and/or numbers, delimited by one or more of most other characters. So first word of the above list results in de.