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Title: locale — Internationalization services — Python 3.13.18 documentation
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Year: 2024
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URL: https://docs.python.org/3.13/library/locale.html
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ABSTRACT
locale — Internationalization services — Python 3.13.18 documentation Navigation index modules | next | previous | Python » 3.13.18 Documentation » The Python standard library » Internationalization » locale — Internationalization services | Theme Auto Light Dark | locale — Internationalization services¶ Source code: Lib/locale.py The locale module opens access to the POSIX locale database and functionality. The POSIX locale mechanism allows programmers to deal with certain cultural issues in an application, without requiring the programmer to know all the specifics of each country where the software is executed. The locale module is implemented on top of the _locale module, which in turn uses an ANSI C locale implementation if available. The locale module defines the following exception and functions: exception locale.Error¶ Exception raised when the locale passed to setlocale() is not recognized. locale.setlocale(category, locale=None)¶ If locale is given and not None, setlocale() modifies the locale setting for the category. The available categories are listed in the data description below. locale may be a string, or a pair, language code and encoding. An empty string specifies the user’s default settings. If the modification of the locale fails, the exception Error is raised. If successful, the new locale setting is returned. If locale is a pair, it is converted to a locale name using the locale aliasing engine. The language code has the same format as a locale name, but without encoding and @-modifier. The language code and encoding can be None. If locale is omitted or None, the current setting for category is returned. Example: import locale loc = locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL) # get current locale # use German locale; name and availability varies with platform locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, 'de_DE.UTF-8') locale.strcoll('f\xe4n', 'foo') # compare a string containing an umlaut locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, '') # use user's preferred locale locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, 'C') # use default (C) locale locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, loc) # restore saved locale setlocale() is not thread-safe on most systems. Applications typically start with a call of: import locale locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, '') This sets the locale for all categories to the user’s default setting (typically specified in the LANG environment variable). If the locale is not changed thereafter, using multithreading should not cause problems. locale.localeconv()¶ Returns the database of the local conventions as a dictionary. This dictionary has the following strings as keys: Category Key Meaning LC_NUMERIC 'decimal_point' Decimal point character. 'grouping' Sequence of numbers specifying which relative positions the 'thousands_sep' is expected. If the sequence is terminated with CHAR_MAX, no further grouping is performed. If the sequence terminates with a 0, the last group size is repeatedly used. 'thousands_sep' Character used between groups. LC_MONETARY 'int_curr_symbol' International currency symbol. 'currency_symbol' Local currency symbol. 'p_cs_precedes/n_cs_precedes' Whether the currency symbol precedes the value (for positive resp. negative values). 'p_sep_by_space/n_sep_by_space' Whether the currency symbol is separated from the value by a space (for positive resp. negative values). 'mon_decimal_point' Decimal point used for monetary values. 'frac_digits' Number of fractional digits used in local formatting of monetary values. 'int_frac_digits' Number of fractional digits used in international formatting of monetary values. 'mon_thousands_sep' Group separator used for monetary values. 'mon_grouping' Equivalent to 'grouping', used for monetary values. 'positive_sign' Symbol used to annotate a positive monetary value. 'negative_sign' Symbol used to annotate a negative monetary value. 'p_sign_posn/n_sign_posn' The position of the sign (for positive resp. negative values), see below. All numeric values can be set to CHAR_MAX to indicate that there is no value specified in this locale. The possible values for 'p_sign_posn' and 'n_sign_posn' are given below. Value Explanation 0 Currency and value are surrounded by parentheses. 1 The sign should precede the value and currency symbol. 2 The sign should follow the value and currency symbol. 3 The sign should immediately precede the value. 4 The sign should immediately follow the value. CHAR_MAX Nothing is specified in this locale. The function temporarily sets the LC_CTYPE locale to the LC_NUMERIC locale or the LC_MONETARY locale if locales are different and numeric or monetary strings are non-ASCII. This temporary change affects other threads. Changed in version 3.7: The function now temporarily sets the LC_CTYPE locale to the LC_NUMERIC locale in some cases. locale.nl_langinfo(option)¶ Return some locale-specific information as a string. This function is not available on all systems, and the set of possible options might also vary across platforms. The possible argument values are numbers, for which symbolic constants are available in the locale module. The nl_langinfo() function accepts one of the following keys. Most descriptions are taken from the corresponding description in the GNU C library. locale.CODESET¶ Get a string with the name of the character encoding used in the selected locale. locale.D_T_FMT¶ Get a string that can be used as a format string for time.strftime() to represent date and time in a locale-specific way. locale.D_FMT¶ Get a string that can be used as a format string for time.strftime() to represent a date in a locale-specific way. locale.T_FMT¶ Get a string that can be used as a format string for time.strftime() to represent a time in a locale-specific way. locale.T_FMT_AMPM¶ Get a format string for time.strftime() to represent time in the am/pm format. locale.DAY_1¶ locale.DAY_2¶ locale.DAY_3¶ locale.DAY_4¶ locale.DAY_5¶ locale.DAY_6¶ locale.DAY_7¶ Get the name of the n-th day of the week. Note This follows the US convention of DAY_1 being Sunday, not the international convention (ISO 8601) that Monday is the first day of the week. locale.ABDAY_1¶ locale.ABDAY_2¶ locale.ABDAY_3¶ locale.ABDAY_4¶ locale.ABDAY_5¶ locale.ABDAY_6¶ locale.ABDAY_7¶ Get the abbreviated name of the n-th day of the week. locale.MON_1¶ locale.MON_2¶ locale.MON_3¶ locale.MON_4¶ locale.MON_5¶ locale.MON_6¶ locale.MON_7¶ locale.MON_8¶ locale.MON_9¶ locale.MON_10¶ locale.MON_11¶ locale.MON_12¶ Get the name of the n-th month. locale.ABMON_1¶ locale.ABMON_2¶ locale.ABMON_3¶ locale.ABMON_4¶ locale.ABMON_5¶ locale.ABMON_6¶ locale.ABMON_7¶ locale.ABMON_8¶ locale.ABMON_9¶ locale.ABMON_10¶ locale.ABMON_11¶ locale.ABMON_12¶ Get the abbreviated name of the n-th month. locale.RADIXCHAR¶ Get the radix character (decimal dot, decimal comma, etc.). locale.THOUSEP¶ Get the separator character for thousands (groups of three digits). locale.YESEXPR¶ Get a regular expression that can be used with the regex function to recognize a positive response to a yes/no question. locale.NOEXPR¶ Get a regular expression that can be used with the regex(3) function to recognize a negative response to a yes/no question. Note The regular expressions for YESEXPR and NOEXPR use syntax suitable for the regex function from the C library, which might differ from the syntax used in re. locale.CRNCYSTR¶ Get the currency symbol, preceded by “-” if the symbol should appear before the value, “+” if the symbol should appear after the value, or “.” if the symbol should replace the radix character. locale.ERA¶ Get a string which describes how years are counted and displayed for each era in a locale. Most locales do not define this value. An example of a locale which does define this value is the Japanese one. In Japan, the traditional representation of dates includes the name of the era corresponding to the then-emperor’s reign. Normally it should not be necessary to use this value directly. Specifying the E modifier in their format strings causes the time.strftime() function to use this information. The format of the returned string is specified in The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 8, paragraph 7.3.5.2 LC_TIME C-Language Access. locale.ERA_D_T_FMT¶ Get a format string for time.strftime() to represent date and time in a locale-specific era-based way. locale.ERA_D_FMT¶ Get a format string for time.strftime() to represent a date in a locale-specific era-based way. locale.ERA_T_FMT¶ Get a format string for time.strftime() to represent a time in a locale-specific era-based way. locale.ALT_DIGITS¶ Get a string consisting of up to 100 semicolon-separated symbols used to represent the values 0 to 99 in a locale-specific way. In most locales this is an empty string. locale.getdefaultlocale([envvars])¶ Tries to determine the default locale settings and returns them as a tuple of the form (language code, encoding). According to POSIX, a program which has not called setlocale(LC_ALL, '') runs using the portable 'C' locale. Calling setlocale(LC_ALL, '') lets it use the default locale as defined by the LANG variable. Since we do not want to interfere with the current locale setting we thus emulate the behavior in the way described above. To maintain compatibility with other platforms, not only the LANG variable is tested, but a list of variables given as envvars parameter. The first found to be defined will be used. envvars defaults to the search path used in GNU gettext; it must always contain the variable name 'LANG'. The GNU gettext search path contains 'LC_ALL', 'LC_CTYPE', 'LANG' and 'LANGUAGE', in that order. The language code has the same format as a locale name, but without encoding and @-modifier. The language code and encoding may be None if their values cannot be determined. The “C” locale is represented as (None, None). locale.getlocale(category=LC_CTYPE)¶ Returns the current setting for the given locale category as a tuple containing the language code and encoding. category may be one of the LC_* values except LC_ALL. It defaults to LC_CTYPE. The language code has the same format as a locale name, but without encoding and @-modifier. The language code and encoding may be None if their values cannot be determined. The “C” locale is represented as (None, None). locale.getpreferredencoding(do_setlocale=True)¶ Return the locale encoding used for text data, according to user preferences. User preferences are expressed differently on different systems, and might not be available programmatically on some systems, so this function only returns a guess. On some systems, it is necessary to invoke setlocale() to obtain the user preferences, so this function is not thread-safe. If invoking setlocale is not necessary or desired, do_setlocale should be set to False. On Android or if the Python UTF-8 Mode is enabled, always return 'utf-8', the locale encoding and the do_setlocale argument are ignored. The Python preinitialization configures the LC_CTYPE locale. See also the filesystem encoding and error handler. Changed in version 3.7: The function now always returns "utf-8" on Android or if the Python UTF-8 Mode is enabled. locale.getencoding()¶ Get the current locale encoding: On Android and VxWorks, return "utf-8". On Unix, return the encoding of the current LC_CTYPE locale. Return "utf-8" if nl_langinfo(CODESET) returns an empty string: for example, if the current LC_CTYPE locale is not supported. On Windows, return the ANSI code page. The Python preinitialization configures the LC_CTYPE locale. See also the filesystem encoding and error handler. This function is similar to getpreferredencoding(False) except this function ignores the Python UTF-8 Mode. Added in version 3.11. locale.normalize(localename)¶ Returns a normalized locale code for the given locale name. The returned locale code is formatted for use with setlocale(). If normalization fails, the original name is returned unchanged. If the given encoding is not known, the function defaults to the default encoding for the locale code just like setlocale(). locale.strcoll(string1, string2)¶ Compares two strings according to the current LC_COLLATE setting. As any other compare function, returns a negative, or a positive value, or 0, depending on whether string1 collates before or after string2 or is equal to it. locale.strxfrm(string)¶ Transforms a string to one that can be used in locale-aware comparisons. For example, strxfrm(s1)