[Tutor] How to find language name

[Liam Clarke]

Hi Michael,

quoted from docs ---
To maintain compatibility with other platforms, not only the LANG
variable is tested, but a list of variables given as envvars
parameter. The first found to be defined will be used. envvars
defaults to the search path used in GNU gettext; it must always
contain the variable name "LANG". The GNU gettext search path contains
'LANGUAGE', 'LC_ALL', 'LC_CTYPE', and 'LANG', in that order.


Unless I'm wrong, and someone will let me know very shortly if I am;
the returned tuple from  getdefaultlocale will always be (language
code, encoding)

Regards,

Liam Clarke


On Mon, 25 Oct 2004 21:15:55 +0200, Michael Lange <klappnase at freenet.de> wrote:
> Hello tutors,
> 
> I'm struggling here with a problem trying to determine the current language name.
> I need the ISO 639 style two letter abbreviations, like 'en' for english etc.
> I tried using locale.getdefaultlocale() and it seems to do just what I want:
> 
> >>> import locale
> >>> locale.getdefaultlocale()
> ['de_DE', 'de']
> >>> locale.getlocale()
> ['de_DE', 'ISO8859-1']
> 
> It looks like I could just do:
> 
> langName = locale.getdefaultlocale()[1]
> 
> Unfortunately the documentation for the locale module confuses me at this point:
> 
> getdefaultlocale([envvars])
> 
>     Tries to determine the default locale settings and returns them as a tuple of the form (language code, encoding).
>                                                                                                            ^^^^^^^^
> getlocale([category])
> 
>     Returns the current setting for the given locale category as sequence containing language code, encoding
>                                                                                                     ^^^^^^^^
> My question now, is the behavior of getdefaultlocale() platform specific, in other words, may it happen
> that getdefaultlocale()[1] will be something like 'ISO8859-1' ? (BTW, my app is supposed to run on *nix systems
> exclusively.)
> 
> Any hints are much appreciated. Thanks
> 
> Michael
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Tutor maillist  -  Tutor at python.org
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
> 


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