French locale issues

[Andre Renault]

Hi all,

I’m posting about this since it doesn’t seem to really be covered anywhere else online, and hopefully it can help anyone else with a different locale and disappearing settings.

Because I work in Québec, my system language is French. My administrators have changed the system decimal separator to a period instead of a comma (default value) so HEC-RAS has no problem with that.

Recently I’ve been having issues with HEC-RAS “forgetting” settings, or settings disappearing. For instance, when I’m running 1D unsteady models, I have to reactivate Mixed Flow every time I open an unsteady flow plan. Similarly, the breach settings keep getting reset to Set Time, even though I specifically select WS Elev as the criterion.

The problem I’ve found is that when creating .pXX, .gXX, and .uXX files, HEC-RAS writes “Vrai” and “Faux” instead of “True” and “False”. Then, when it opens the files, it doesn’t seem to know what “Vrai” and “Faux” mean, and just defaults to “False” (I think) in its interpretation. The stopgap solution I’ve found is to close the project, open PowerShell, periodically navigate to the project folder, and run this line:

Get-ChildItem .\*.*[0-9][0-9] | ForEach-Object { (Get-Content $_.FullName) -replace “Vrai”, “True” -replace “Faux”, “False” | Set-Content $_.FullName }

This will look in all files ending with 2 digits (so pXX, gXX, bcXX, etc.) and do a find and replace on Vrai/Faux to True/False. Now, when I open the project again, the Mixed Flow and Breach settings are miraculously restored! Unfortunately, I haven’t found a setting to change what language HEC-RAS writes to file. I will try changing my system settings so it’s in English, but I find it singularly unfortunate that this does not appear to be a transparent setting in HEC-RAS. I could try emailing USACE about the bug, but last time I reported a bug, I never heard back and I have no idea if they paid attention to it… rather opaque user experience, but anyway…

I hope this helps someone else who is frustrated about disappearing settings!

Kind regards,
André Renault

[Eric R]

Information like this really helps.
I understand that other users with particular problems, especially those not covered by the manual, should be encouraged to post their experiences in this forum. It would be very beneficial for everyone.

Chris, we’re all waiting for the forum search bar to work properly again, so that information like this doesn’t get lost!

[Chris Goodell]

Hi Andre- To avoid these issues, you need to change your Windows Regional Settings to English (United States). Just changing the decimal character type to “.” is not enough as you found out. Language and dates also have an influence on RAS operation. So best to just get it all set properly with by changing the regional settings. Hope this helps.

[Chris Goodell]

Eric, thanks for the reminder. This fell (way) off my radar. I’ll see if I can get it fixed asap.

-Chris

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