Some information about locale (was Re: [Python-Dev] repr vs. str and locales again)
Guido van Rossum
guido@python.org
Mon, 22 May 2000 09:16:08 -0700
> From: "Fredrik Lundh" <effbot@telia.com>
>
> Peter Funk wrote:
> > AFAIK locale and friends conform to POSIX.1. Calling this obsolescent...
> > hmmm... may offend a *LOT* of people. Try this on comp.os.linux.advocacy ;-)
>
> you're missing the point -- now that we've added unicode support to
> Python, the old 8-bit locale *ctype* stuff no longer works. while some
> platforms implement a wctype interface, it's not widely available, and it's
> not always unicode.
Huh? We were talking strictly 8-bit strings here. The locale support
hasn't changed there.
> so in order to provide platform-independent unicode support, Python 1.6
> comes with unicode-aware and fully portable replacements for the ctype
> functions.
For those who only need Latin-1 or another 8-bit ASCII superset, the
Unicode stuff is overkill.
> the code is already in there...
>
> > On POSIX systems there are a several environment variables used to
> > control the default locale settings for a users session. For example
> > on my SuSE Linux system currently running in the german locale the
> > environment variable LC_CTYPE=de_DE is automatically set by a file
> > /etc/profile during login, which causes automatically the C-library
> > function toupper('ä') to return an 'Ä' ---you should see
> > a lower case a-umlaut as argument and an upper case umlaut as return
> > value--- without having all applications to call 'setlocale' explicitly.
> >
> > So this simply works well as intended without having to add calls
> > to 'setlocale' to all application program using this C-library functions.
>
> note that this leaves us with four string flavours in 1.6:
>
> - 8-bit binary arrays. may contain binary goop, or text in some strange
> encoding. upper, strip, etc should not be used.
These are not strings.
> - 8-bit text strings using the system encoding. upper, strip, etc works
> as long as the locale is properly configured.
>
> - 8-bit unicode text strings. upper, strip, etc may work, as long as the
> system encoding is a subset of unicode -- which means US ASCII or
> ISO Latin 1.
This is a figment of your imagination. You can use 8-bit text strings
to contain Latin-1, but you have to set your locale to match.
> - wide unicode text strings. upper, strip, etc always works.
>
> is this complexity really worth it?
From a backwards compatibility point of view, yes. Basically,
programs that don't use Unicode should see no change in semantics.
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)