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pythonlocale

Temporarily override locale with a context manager

Is there a way to temporarily activate a locale within the scope of a block of code? Basically, I want to do something like this:

locale.setlocale(locale.LC_NUMERIC, 'nl_BE.utf8')

Like this:

with override_locale(locale.LC_NUMERIC, 'nl_BE.utf8'):
   # Stuff here

That way I can also avoid any thread safety issues that may arise when using setlocale. My use case is parsing an uploaded file where the decimals use a comma instead of a period as the decimal separator (e.g. 1,25 instead of 1.25).

Solution

  • I found out that Babel better fits my use case:

    >>> parse_decimal('1,25', locale='nl_BE.utf8')
Decimal('1.25')

    This approach is useful whenever I need to parse a Dutch decimal and doesn't require overriding any locales at all.