Sorting list of string with specific locale in python

Question

I work on an application that uses texts from different languages, so, for viewing or reporting purposes, some texts (strings) need to be sorted in a specific language.

Currently I have a workaround messing with the global locale settings, which is bad, and I don't want to put it in production:

default_locale = locale.getlocale(locale.LC_COLLATE)

def sort_strings(strings, locale_=None):
    if locale_ is None:
        return sorted(strings)

    locale.setlocale(locale.LC_COLLATE, locale_)
    sorted_strings = sorted(strings, cmp=locale.strcoll)
    locale.setlocale(locale.LC_COLLATE, default_locale)

    return sorted_strings

The official python locale documentation explicitly says that saving and restoring is a bad idea, but does not give any suggestions: http://docs.python.org/library/locale.html#background-details-hints-tips-and-caveats

Answer 1

Glibc does support a locale API with an explicit state. Here's a quick wrapper for that API made with ctypes.

# -*- coding: utf-8
import ctypes


class Locale(object):
    def __init__(self, locale):
        LC_ALL_MASK = 8127
        # LC_COLLATE_MASK = 8
        self.libc = ctypes.CDLL("libc.so.6")
        self.ctx = self.libc.newlocale(LC_ALL_MASK, locale, 0)



    def strxfrm(self, src, iteration=1):
        size = 3 * iteration * len(src)
        dest =  ctypes.create_string_buffer('\000' * size)
        n = self.libc.strxfrm_l(dest, src, size,  self.ctx)
        if n < size:
            return dest.value
        elif iteration<=4:
            return self.strxfrm(src, iteration+1)
        else:
            raise Exception('max number of iterations trying to increase dest reached')


    def __del__(self):
        self.libc.freelocale(self.ctx)

and a short test

locale1 = Locale('C')
locale2 = Locale('mk_MK.UTF-8')

a_list = ['а', 'б', 'в', 'ј', 'ќ', 'џ', 'ш']
import random
random.shuffle(a_list)

assert sorted(a_list, key=locale1.strxfrm) == ['а', 'б', 'в', 'ш', 'ј', 'ќ', 'џ']
assert sorted(a_list, key=locale2.strxfrm) == ['а', 'б', 'в', 'ј', 'ќ', 'џ', 'ш']

what's left to do is implement all the locale functions, support for python unicode strings (with wchar* functions I guess), and automatically import the include file definitions or something