Locale confusion

[Jorgen Grahn]

On 11 Jan 2005 05:49:32 -0800, Serge.Orlov at gmail.com <Serge.Orlov at gmail.com> wrote:
> Jorgen Grahn wrote:
> [snip]
> 
>>
>> frailea> cat foo
>> import locale
>> print locale.getlocale()
>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE)
>> print locale.getlocale()

...

>> When I run it as a script it isn't though, and the setlocale() call
> does not
>> appear to fall back to looking at $LANG as it's supposed to(?), so my
>> LC_CTYPE remains in the POSIX locale:
...
>> So, is this my fault or Python's?  I realize I could just adapt and
> set
>> $LC_CTYPE explicitly in my environment, but I don't want to
> capitulate for a
>> Python bug, if that's what this is.
> 
> Try locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE,"") as in your C program.

Oops, you are right. locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE,"") sets the locale
from my environment (and gets it right!) while
locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE) /returns/ the current locale. I don't know
how I could have missed that, since it's clearly documented and also maps
directly to C usage.

> It would
> be great if locale.setlocale with one parameter would be deprecated,
> because it suddenly acts like getlocale. It's unpythonic.

I dislike the term "unpythonic", but I tend to agree with you in practice
here. Even better, but maybe not feasible, would be an approach to locales
which doesn't involve changing a global state in this fashion.

> By the way, since you took time to setup various LC_* variables there
> is no need to play with LC_CTYPE category. Just use the standard idiom.
> import locale
> locale.setlocale(LC_ALL,"")

Thanks for pointing that out. I picked out LC_CTYPE for my small program
because I was in a hurry and didn't want to risk non-standard sorting
elsewhere in the program.  I hate what the LC_COLLATE=C does to swedish
national characters, but I hate what LC_COLLATE=sv_SE does to non-alphabetic
characters even more.

To paraphrase Barbie: "i18n is hard". ;-)

/Jorgen

-- 
  // Jorgen Grahn <jgrahn@       Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu
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