translating foreign data

[Richard Damon]

On 6/23/18 7:46 AM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Sat, 23 Jun 2018 06:26:22 -0400, Richard Damon wrote:
>
>> If you know the Locale, then you do know what the decimal separator is,
>> as that is part of what a locale defines.
> A locale defines a set of common cultural conventions. It doesn't mandate 
> the actual conventions in use in any specific document.
>
> If I'm in Australia, using the en-AU locale, nevertheless I can generate 
> a file using , as a decimal separator. Try and stop me :-)
yes, you can MIS-use the en-AU locale and write 1,000 to mean the number
One, just as you can misuse the language and write cat when you mean a
member of the Canine group, but then the misinterpretation is on the
creator of the document, not on the program that was told how the
document is to be read.
>
> But your point is taken -- I misread Ethan saying that he knew the locale 
> and it wasn't helping, when in fact he was reluctant to change the locale 
> as that's a process-wide global change.
>
>> The issue is that if you just
>> know the encoding, you don't necessarily know the locale. He also
>> commented that he didn't want to set the locale in the routine, as that
>> sets it globally for the full application (but perhaps that latter could
>> be fixed by first doing a locale.getlocale(), then setlocale for the
>> files locale, and then at the end of reading and processing restore back
>> the old locale.
> Indeed.
>
>

-- 
Richard Damon