locale.getlocale() problems on OSX

Question

I need to get the system locale to do a number of things, ultimately I want to translate my app using gettext. I am going to distribute it on both Linux and OSX, but I ran into problems on OSX Snow Leopard:

$ python
Python 2.5.2 (r252:60911, Jan  4 2009, 17:40:26) 
[GCC 4.3.2] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import locale
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, '')
'sv_SE.UTF-8'
>>> locale.getlocale()
('sv_SE', 'UTF8')

$ python
Python 2.6.1 (r261:67515, Jul  7 2009, 23:51:51) 
[GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5646)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import locale
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, '')
'C'
>>> locale.getlocale()
(None, None)

Both systems are using Swedish languages. On Linux, the environment variable LANG is already set to "sv_SE.UTF-8". If I pass that variable to python on OSX (LANG="sv_SE.UTF-8" python instead), locale is detected nicely. But shouldn't locale.getlocale()be able to fetch whatever language the operating system has? I don't want to force users to set LANG, LC_ALL or any environment variable at all.

Output of locale command:

$ locale
LANG=
LC_COLLATE="C"
LC_CTYPE="C"
LC_MESSAGES="C"
LC_MONETARY="C"
LC_NUMERIC="C"
LC_TIME="C"
LC_ALL=

Answer 1

Odd on OSX (Smow Leopard 10.6.1) I get

$ python
Python 2.6.1 (r261:67515, Jul  7 2009, 23:51:51) 
[GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5646)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.  
>>> import locale
>>> locale.getlocale()
(None, None)
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, '')
'en_GB.UTF-8'
>>> locale.getlocale()
('en_GB', 'UTF8')

Edit:

I just found this on the apple python mailing list

Basically it depends on what is set in your environment at run time (one of LANG, LANGUAGE, LC_ALL) I had LANG=en_GB.UTF-8 in my shell environment

Answer 2

Looks like you can change locale by changing environment variable LC_ALL.

$ export LC_ALL=C
$ python
Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Feb  6 2009, 19:02:12) 
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5465)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import locale
>>> locale.getlocale()
(None, None)
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, "")
'C'
>>> locale.getlocale()
(None, None)    

$ export LC_ALL=en_GB.UTF-8
$ python
Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Feb  6 2009, 19:02:12) 
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5465)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import locale
>>> locale.getlocale()
(None, None)
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, "")
'en_GB.UTF-8'
>>> locale.getlocale()
('en_GB', 'UTF8')