[Tutor] locale.set/getlocale asymmetry

[Albert-Jan Roskam]

Hi,
 
There is an asymmetry in getlocale and setlocale. What is returned by getlocale cannot be used
as argument for setlocale. It is important to mention that this is on Windows 7.  Setlocale appears 
to use a Linux/Posix locale specification (yaay, harmony!), but, disappointingly, getlocale still returns 
the windows-specific locale specification. Why is this? Is this some historical anomaly?
 
Background: I occasionally need to use a french locale because that locale uses a space as a thousand separator.
So I'd like to temporarily change that, then fire up Excel, which hopefully ensures the numbers are displayed
as desired.
 
#Python 2.7.1 (r271:86832, Nov 27 2010, 18:30:46) [MSC v.1500 32 bit (Intel)] on win32
>>> import platform
>>> platform.platform() 
'Windows-7-6.1.7601-SP1'
>>> import locale
>>> locale.getlocale()
('Dutch_Netherlands', '1252')
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, "French_France")
'French_France.1252'>>> locale.getlocale()
('fr_FR', 'cp1252')
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, ('fr_FR', 'cp1252'))
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#10>", line 1, in <module>
    locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, ('fr_FR', 'cp1252'))
  File "C:\Python27\lib\locale.py", line 531, in setlocale
    return _setlocale(category, locale)
Error: unsupported locale setting

Regards,
Albert-Jan


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