International characters and Python's string functions on Linux

[Alexander Staubo]

In article <Pine.LNX.4.04.9908061223110.24989-
100000 at emerald.netskate.ru>, phd at emerald.netskate.ru says...
> On Thu, 5 Aug 1999, John (Max) Skaller wrote:
> > 	Wrong. Python doesn't use C locale functions.
> 
>    What about
> 
> import locale
> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, "")
> 
>    ? With this, python supports locale without any problem.

Good idea, but:

Python 1.5.2 (#9, Jul  2 1999, 04:33:02)  [GCC 2.8.1] on linux2
Copyright 1991-1995 Stichting Mathematisch Centrum, Amsterdam
>>> import locale
Traceback (innermost last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
  File "/usr/local/lib/python1.5/locale.py", line 4, in ?
    from _locale import *
ImportError: No module named _locale
>>> 

This is Slackware Linux 2.2/libc6. Should I configure Python with some 
kind of magic parameter for the locale stuff to work?
 
> > UTF-8 is,
> > in my opinion, the best option in Python today, since it
> 
>    I don't think so. UNICODE/UTF8 have not only advatntages, but some
> drawbacks too...

In general, UNICODE is great -- at least if we ignore the fact that it 
doubles memory consumption, and in 99% of all cases with no particular 
benefit to the application or the user.

But in the context of Zope, which is where I need the international 
support right now, it's useless -- I doubt Zope can be easily tweaked to 
use UNICODE what with all the string stuff in C assuming 8-bit character 
sets.

Anyway, Latin 1 is perfectly capable of containing the characters I need, 
so all this is academic -- I just need to expand the range of the 
uppercase/lowercase constants, cleanly. The documentation warns against 
modifying these directly. Unless somebody tells me this is safe, I want 
to avoid it.

-- 
Alexander Staubo             http://www.mop.no/~alex/
"Elvis skipped around the car and threw open the trunk.
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