[New-bugs-announce] [issue5815] locale.getdefaultlocale() missing corner case

[rg3]

New submission from rg3 <sarbalap+freshmeat at gmail.com>:

A recent issue with one of my programs has shown that
locale.getdefaultlocale() does not handle correctly a corner case. The
issue URL is this one:

http://bitbucket.org/rg3/youtube-dl/issue/7/

Essentially, some users have LANG set to something like
es_CA.UTF-8 at valencia. In that case, locale.getdefaultlocale() returns,
as the encoding, the string "utf_8_valencia", which cannot be used as an
argument to the string encode() function. The obvious correct encoding
in this case is UTF-8.

I have traced the problem and it seems that it could be fixed by the
attached patch. It checks if the encoding, at that point, contains the
'@' symbol and, in that case, removes everything starting at that point,
leaving only "UTF-8".

I am not sure if this patch or a similar one should be applied to other
Python versions. My system has Python 2.5.2 and that's what I have patched.

Explanation as to why I put the code there:

* The simple case, es_CA.UTF-8 goes through that point too and enters
the "if".
* I wanted to remove what goes after the '@' symbol at that point, so it
either needed to be removed before the call to the normalizing function
or inside the normalization.
* As this is not what I would consider a normalization, I put the code
before the function call.

Thanks for your hard work. I hope my patch is valid.

Regards.

----------
components: Library (Lib)
files: locale.diff
keywords: patch
messages: 86312
nosy: rg3
severity: normal
status: open
title: locale.getdefaultlocale() missing corner case
type: behavior
versions: Python 2.5
Added file: http://bugs.python.org/file13737/locale.diff

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