In article <1394626979.46880.yahoomailba...@web163806.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>, Albert-Jan Roskam <fo...@yahoo.com> wrote: > locale.getlocale() sometimes returns (None, None) under OSX (Python 2, not > sure about Python 3, but I think so). The problem is outlined here: > http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1629699/locale-getlocale-problems-on-osx
Python's locale uses the plaform's locale implementation and POSIX locale is an old and somewhat weird animal. Make sure you thoroughly read the description of the locale module, in particular, the caveats section: http://docs.python.org/2/library/locale.html#background-details-hints-tip s-and-caveats The first gotcha is that you need to explicitly call locale.setlocale("LC_ALL,"") to get the preferred locale environment, as either specified by the user, by LANG or other LC_* environment variables, or the platform defaults. In general, OS X does not provide a default for your process. However, various environments do. The OS X Terminal.app has profile settings (Preferences -> Settings -> (Profile name) -> Advanced) to specific a character encoding and a checkbox to "Set locale environment variables on startup". With that set properly, programs run under Terminal.app will see LANG set. The user can also set an explicit LANG value in a shell profile, like .profile or .bashrc, but those only apply when a shell is being used. Depending on which profile it is set in, that might not work under all conditions, like under "sudo" or in an "ssh" session. Setting an env variable in a shell profile would also not apply to an double-clickable app bundle since no shell is involved in launching it; it is possible to set environment variables in the app's Info.plist, though. > What is the cause of this? Is it limited to just Darwin systes? Does the > 'horrible hack' solution on OS have any drawbacks? I like it better because > it is not needed to set the LC_ALL environment variable prior to starting the > Python program. As the caveats section points out, setting locale env vars may have unwanted side effects on other parts of the process it is running in or creates. So, if you are using it in a standalone program, it may be OK. If you are using it a module intended to be used by other programs, you probably shouldn't be changing something that could break other parts of the calling program. -- Ned Deily, n...@acm.org -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
