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locale.getlocale() fails if locale name doesn't include encoding #64287
Description
| BPO | 20088 |
|---|---|
| Nosy | @malemburg, @loewis, @tjguk, @zware, @serhiy-storchaka, @eryksun, @zooba, @Kristinita |
Note: these values reflect the state of the issue at the time it was migrated and might not reflect the current state.
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GitHub fields:
assignee = None
closed_at = None
created_at = <Date 2013-12-28.09:44:02.941>
labels = ['3.8', 'type-bug', 'library', '3.9', '3.10']
title = "locale.getlocale() fails if locale name doesn't include encoding"
updated_at = <Date 2021-03-04.15:21:05.592>
user = 'https://github.com/serhiy-storchaka'bugs.python.org fields:
activity = <Date 2021-03-04.15:21:05.592>
actor = 'eryksun'
assignee = 'none'
closed = False
closed_date = None
closer = None
components = ['Library (Lib)']
creation = <Date 2013-12-28.09:44:02.941>
creator = 'serhiy.storchaka'
dependencies = []
files = []
hgrepos = []
issue_num = 20088
keywords = []
message_count = 4.0
messages = ['207026', '235823', '235840', '388095']
nosy_count = 9.0
nosy_names = ['lemburg', 'loewis', 'tim.golden', 'Arfrever', 'zach.ware', 'serhiy.storchaka', 'eryksun', 'steve.dower', 'nervov_fan']
pr_nums = []
priority = 'normal'
resolution = None
stage = None
status = 'open'
superseder = None
type = 'behavior'
url = 'https://bugs.python.org/issue20088'
versions = ['Python 3.8', 'Python 3.9', 'Python 3.10']
Activity
serhiy-storchaka commentedon Dec 28, 2013
One solution is proposed in bpo-20079: map all supported in glibc locale names without encoding to locale names with encoding. But see bpo-20087. And default encoding can be different on other systems (not based on glibc).
Other solution is not guess an encoding, but use locale.nl_langinfo(locale.CODESET) in locale.getlocale(). And left in locale alias table only nonstandard mappings (such as english_uk -> en_GB.ISO8859-1 and sr_yu.iso88595 -> sr_CS.ISO8859-5).
BreamoreBoy commentedon Feb 12, 2015
With bpo-20079 closed but bpo-20087 still open where do we stand with this issue?
eryksun commentedon Feb 12, 2015
For 3.5 this affects Windows as well, since the new CRT supports RFC1766 language codes, but only without a codepage spec:
Python 3.5.0a1 (v3.5.0a1:5d4b6a57d5fd, Feb 7 2015, 18:15:14) [MSC v.1900 64 bit (AMD64)] on win32 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> import locale >>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, 'en-GB') 'en-GB' >>> locale.getlocale() Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> File "C:\Program Files\Python35\lib\locale.py", line 578, in getlocale return _parse_localename(localename) File "C:\Program Files\Python35\lib\locale.py", line 487, in _parse_localename raise ValueError('unknown locale: %s' % localename) ValueError: unknown locale: en-GBOn Vista+ (since 3.5 drops XP support) the codepage can be queried easily via GetLocaleInfoEx:
>>> from ctypes import * >>> LOCALE_IDEFAULTANSICODEPAGE = 0x1004 >>> GetLocaleInfoEx = WinDLL('kernel32').GetLocaleInfoEx >>> info = (c_wchar * 100)() >>> GetLocaleInfoEx("en-GB", LOCALE_IDEFAULTANSICODEPAGE, info, len(info)) 5 >>> info.value '1252' >>> GetLocaleInfoEx("zh-CN", LOCALE_IDEFAULTANSICODEPAGE, info, len(info)) 4 >>> info.value '936'Note that Windows follows the RFC spec here (not POSIX), using a hyphen instead of an underscore.
This is a bit of tangent, but for the Windows full language_country.codepage form, the X-11 based locale_alias dict is generally useless. So, contrary to the docs, on Windows getlocale doesn't return the language code in RFC 1766 form. In some cases it does, but only by chance.
eryksun commentedon Mar 4, 2021
The locale_alias database was extended to support "en_AG" and many others, but I'd still prefer Serhiy's suggestion to not guess the codeset when checking the default LC_CTYPE category. Use locale.nl_langinfo(locale.CODESET), if it's available.
In Windows, I'd prefer to never guess since the encoding for a BCP-47 locale name can be directly queried. But this issue can be restricted to POSIX. What to do in Windows is already being considered in more recent issues: bpo-23425, bpo-37945, and bpo-43115.
StanFromIreland commentedon Mar 23, 2025
This is no longer an issue on Linux, I cannot reproduce in any way, a default is provided (UTF-8), and it seems the windows discussion was moved elsewhere, is there anything to do here?
picnixz commentedon Apr 1, 2025
I'm going to close this one as it works on Linux.