New submission from Dmitry Jemerov:

On Mac OS X 10.8 with the default language set to English (System Preferences | 
Language and Text), the default terminal application sets the LC_CTYPE 
environment variable to "UTF-8". If you run Python from the terminal and try to 
use locale.getdefaultlocate(), you get the following error:

> python
Python 2.7.2 (default, Oct 11 2012, 20:14:37)
[GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple Clang 4.0 (tags/Apple/clang-418.0.60)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import locale
>>> locale.getdefaultlocale()
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File 
"/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/locale.py",
 line 496, in getdefaultlocale
    return _parse_localename(localename)
  File 
"/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/locale.py",
 line 428, in _parse_localename
    raise ValueError, 'unknown locale: %s' % localename
ValueError: unknown locale: UTF-8

(The stacktrace is from Python 2.7 but Python 3.3 suffers from the same 
problem.)

There are numerous workarounds for this problem (turning off the "Set locale 
environment variables on startup" option in the terminal settings, or adding 
"export LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF8" to .bash_profile, selecting a language other than 
English in the Language & Text settings), but these require additional 
configuration from the user's side. 

I think that the more useful behavior is for Python to handle this behavior of 
the system and not crash, even though it doesn't strictly comply to the POSIX 
standard.

The attached patch (against current Python 3.4 master branch) is one possible 
fix.

----------
components: Library (Lib)
files: getdefaultlocale.patch
keywords: patch
messages: 192422
nosy: Dmitry.Jemerov
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: locale.getdefaultlocale() fails on Mac OS X with default language set to 
English
versions: Python 2.7, Python 3.4
Added file: http://bugs.python.org/file30807/getdefaultlocale.patch

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Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue18378>
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