OS locale support for use in Python

Question

The following Python code works on my Windows machine (Python 2.5.4), but doesn't on my Debian machine (Python 2.5.0). I'm guessing it's OS dependent.

import locale
locale.setlocale( locale.LC_ALL, 'English_United States.1252' )

I receive the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/locale.py", line 476, in setlocale
    return _setlocale(category, locale)
locale.Error: unsupported locale setting

Questions:

• Is it OS dependent?
• How can I find the supported locale list within Python?
• How can I match between Windows locales and Debian locales?

Answer 1

It is OS dependent.

To get the list of local available you can use locale -a in a shell

I think the local you want is something like Windows-1252

Answer 2

Look inside the locale.locale_alias dictionary.

>>> import locale
>>> len(locale.locale_alias)
789
>>> locale.locale_alias.keys()[:5]
['ko_kr.euc', 'is_is', 'ja_jp.mscode', 'kw_gb@euro', 'yi_us.cp1255']
>>>

(In my 2.6.2 installation there are 789 locale names.)