I need to get the system locale to do a number of things, ultimately I want to translate my app using gettext. I am going to distribute it on both Linux and OSX, but I ran into problems on OSX Snow Leopard:
$ python
Python 2.5.2 (r252:60911, Jan 4 2009, 17:40:26)
[GCC 4.3.2] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import locale
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, '')
'sv_SE.UTF-8'
>>> locale.getlocale()
('sv_SE', 'UTF8')
$ python
Python 2.6.1 (r261:67515, Jul 7 2009, 23:51:51)
[GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5646)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import locale
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, '')
'C'
>>> locale.getlocale()
(None, None)
Both systems are using Swedish languages. On Linux, the environment variable LANG is already set to "sv_SE.UTF-8". If I pass that variable to python on OSX (LANG="sv_SE.UTF-8" python instead), locale is detected nicely. But shouldn't locale.getlocale()be able to fetch whatever language the operating system has? I don't want to force users to set LANG, LC_ALL or any environment variable at all.
Output of locale command:
$ locale
LANG=
LC_COLLATE="C"
LC_CTYPE="C"
LC_MESSAGES="C"
LC_MONETARY="C"
LC_NUMERIC="C"
LC_TIME="C"
LC_ALL=
Odd on OSX (Smow Leopard 10.6.1) I get
$ python
Python 2.6.1 (r261:67515, Jul 7 2009, 23:51:51)
[GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5646)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import locale
>>> locale.getlocale()
(None, None)
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, '')
'en_GB.UTF-8'
>>> locale.getlocale()
('en_GB', 'UTF8')
Edit:
I just found this on the apple python mailing list
Basically it depends on what is set in your environment at run time (one of LANG, LANGUAGE, LC_ALL) I had LANG=en_GB.UTF-8 in my shell environment