Portable locale usage

[ssegvic]

Hi,

I am musing on how to write portable Python3 code which would
take advantage of the standard locale module.

For instance, it would be very nice if we could say something like:

# does not work!
myISOCountryCode='hr'
locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, (myISOCountryCode,
locale.getpreferredencoding()))

Up to now, I have found ways to set locale on Linux and Windows:

import locale
locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, 'hr_HR.utf8')      # works on linux
locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, 'hrv_HRV.1250') # works on windows

I have noticed that locale defines a dictionary locale.locale_alias,
and that it contains the following promising keys: 'hr_hr',
'hrvatski', 'hr'.
Unfortunately, both on Windows and Linux all these keys
are bound to the same outdated string 'hr_HR.ISO8859-2'.

My questions are the following:

1. Is there a way for writing portable Python code dealing with
locales
    (as sketched in the beginning)?

2. If not, is there anything wrong with that idea?

3. What is the status of locale.locale_alias (official documentation
does not mention it)?


Cheers,

Sinisa

http://www.zemris.fer.hr/~ssegvic/index_en.html