[New-bugs-announce] [issue47187] locale module example is wrong for some platforms

[Sylvain Marie]

New submission from Sylvain Marie <sylvain.marie at schneider-electric.com>:

The example in the doc shows

```python
>>> import locale
>>> loc = locale.getlocale()  # get current locale
# use German locale; name might vary with platform
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, 'de_DE')
>>> locale.strcoll('f\xe4n', 'foo')  # compare a string containing an umlaut
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, '')   # use user's preferred locale
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, 'C')  # use default (C) locale
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, loc)  # restore saved locale
```

However locale.getlocale() does not return the locale for all categories (locale.LC_ALL is even not allowed) but the locale for the LC_CTYPE category.

Therefore restoring it using `locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, loc)` does not actually restore the initial settings, and may even fail on some platforms (on mine it does).

The correct example should have the first line of code replaced with

```
>>> loc = locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL)  # get current locale
```

Note: this issue was first reported in the `pandas` library at https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas/issues/46595

----------
assignee: docs at python
components: Documentation
messages: 416487
nosy: docs at python, smarie
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: locale module example is wrong for some platforms
versions: Python 3.10

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<https://bugs.python.org/issue47187>
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