OS locale support for use in Python

Question

The following Python code works on my Windows machine (Python 2.5.4), but doesn't on my Debian machine (Python 2.5.0). I'm guessing it's OS dependent.

import locale
locale.setlocale( locale.LC_ALL, 'English_United States.1252' )

I receive the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/locale.py", line 476, in setlocale
    return _setlocale(category, locale)
locale.Error: unsupported locale setting

Questions:

Is it OS dependent?
How can I find the supported locale list within Python?
How can I match between Windows locales and Debian locales?

do you have to hardcode the locale? setlocale(LC_ALL, "") will load the locale defined by the environment. — u0b34a0f6ae, Sep 08 '09 at 18:17

Yoann Le Touche · Answer 1 · 2009-08-11T12:26:50.847

22

It is OS dependent.

To get the list of local available you can use locale -a in a shell

I think the local you want is something like Windows-1252

edited Aug 11 '09 at 12:26

answered Aug 11 '09 at 12:20

Yoann Le Touche

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there's no locale -a in windows – hwjp Apr 28 '11 at 09:25

score 9 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 14 '11 at 09:24

9

try

apt-get install locales-all

for me it works like a charm

answered Apr 14 '11 at 09:24

pippo2600

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1

This is also helpful if one wants to configure locales selectively: http://tlug.dnho.net/node/237 – Eser Aygün Sep 19 '11 at 13:04
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If your want to be a bit more selective, you can install one of the language-pack-* packages, e.g. language-pack-de. – Karl Bartel Jan 18 '12 at 15:54
do you know what the yum equivocation is? yum install locales-all doesnt work. – timh Apr 05 '12 at 04:05

score 8 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 11 '09 at 12:40

8

Look inside the locale.locale_alias dictionary.

>>> import locale
>>> len(locale.locale_alias)
789
>>> locale.locale_alias.keys()[:5]
['ko_kr.euc', 'is_is', 'ja_jp.mscode', 'kw_gb@euro', 'yi_us.cp1255']
>>>

(In my 2.6.2 installation there are 789 locale names.)

answered Aug 11 '09 at 12:40

gimel

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Actually, the locales defined in the alias dictionary are not necessarily supported. – krawyoti Sep 08 '09 at 08:11
I tried a variation of this which was list(set(locale.locale_alias.values()) (values instead of keys because I want the real values, and convert to set and list again to retain only unique values). However there's another problem, as raised here (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1728376/python-get-a-list-of-all-the-encodings-python-can-encode-to/1736533#1736533): are there locales which don't have aliases, and won't be in the alias dictionary at all? – metamatt Jan 08 '11 at 00:30

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Oct 19 '12 at 14:19

1

On Ubuntu Precise type

sudo locale-gen en_US

answered Oct 19 '12 at 14:19

netz75

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OS locale support for use in Python

4 Answers4

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