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bpo-41091: Remove recommendation in curses module documentation to initialize LC_ALL and encode strings #21159

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bpo-41091: Remove recommendation in curses module documentation to initialize LC_ALL and encode strings #21159

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bpo-41091: Remove recommendation in curses module documentation to in… 
…itialize LC_ALL and encode strings

The recommendation to call `locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, '')` is
problematic as it initializes all locale categories to the user
settings, which might be unintended and is not necessary for curses to
work correctly. Initializing LC_CTYPE is sufficient for nl_langinfo() to
return the correct encoding. Current versions of Python initialize
LC_CTYPE at interpreter startup. Therefore calling locale.setlocale()
should not be necessary at all.

The curses module automatically encodes strings. Therefore the
recommendation to manually encode strings is outdated.
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Manuel Jacob
Manuel Jacob committed Jun 25, 2020
commit 62dbbe663677c4416f17279c58cc35f1d837cb10
14 changes: 0 additions & 14 deletions Doc/library/curses.rst
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Expand Up @@ -27,20 +27,6 @@ Linux and the BSD variants of Unix.
Whenever the documentation mentions a *character string* it can be specified
as a Unicode string or a byte string.

.. note::

Since version 5.4, the ncurses library decides how to interpret non-ASCII data
using the ``nl_langinfo`` function. That means that you have to call
:func:`locale.setlocale` in the application and encode Unicode strings
using one of the system's available encodings. This example uses the
system's default encoding::

import locale
locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, '')
code = locale.getpreferredencoding()

Then use *code* as the encoding for :meth:`str.encode` calls.

.. seealso::

Module :mod:`curses.ascii`
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