[Docs-bugs] [issue47187] locale module example is wrong for some platforms

April 1, 2022

      New submission from Sylvain Marie <sylvain.marie@schneider-electric.com>:

The example in the doc shows

```python
...
...
...
import locale
loc = locale.getlocale()  # get current locale
# use German locale; name might vary with platform
locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, 'de_DE')
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

However locale.getlocale() does not return the locale for all categories (locale.LC_ALL is even not allowed) but the locale for the LC_CTYPE category.

Therefore restoring it using `locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, loc)` does not actually restore the initial settings, and may even fail on some platforms (on mine it does).

The correct example should have the first line of code replaced with

...
...
...
loc = locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL)  # get current locale

Note: this issue was first reported in the `pandas` library at https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas/issues/46595

----------
assignee: docs@python
components: Documentation
messages: 416487
nosy: docs@python, smarie
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: locale module example is wrong for some platforms
versions: Python 3.10

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