locale
The locale module opens access to the POSIX locale database and
functionality. The POSIX locale mechanism allows applications to
integrate certain cultural aspects into an applications, without
requiring the programmer to know all the specifics of each country
where the software is executed.
The locale module is implemented on top of the _locale
module, which in turn uses an ANSI C locale implementation if
available.
The locale module defines the following functions:
locale.Error is
raised. If successful, the new locale setting is returned.
If no value is specified, the current setting for the category is returned.
setlocale() is not thread safe on most systems. Applications
typically start with a call of
import locale locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL,"")This sets the locale for all categories to the user's default setting (typically specified in the
LANG environment variable). If the
locale is not changed thereafter, using multithreading should not
cause problems.
decimal_point specifies the decimal point used in
floating point number representations for the LC_NUMERIC
category.grouping is a sequence of numbers specifying at which
relative positions the thousands_sep is expected. If the
sequence is terminated with locale.CHAR_MAX, no further
grouping is performed. If the sequence terminates with a 0, the last
group size is repeatedly used.thousands_sep is the character used between groups.int_curr_symbol specifies the international currency
symbol from the LC_MONETARY category.currency_symbol is the local currency symbol.mon_decimal_point is the decimal point used in monetary
values.mon_thousands_sep is the separator for grouping of
monetary values.mon_grouping has the same format as the grouping
key; it is used for monetary values.positive_sign and negative_sign gives the sign
used for positive and negative monetary quantities.int_frac_digits and frac_digits specify the number
of fractional digits used in the international and local formatting
of monetary values.p_cs_precedes and n_cs_precedes specifies whether
the currency symbol precedes the value for positive or negative
values.p_sep_by_space and n_sep_by_space specifies
whether there is a space between the positive or negative value and
the currency symbol.p_sign_posn and n_sign_posn indicate how the
sign should be placed for positive and negative monetary values.
p_sign_posn and n_sign_posn
are given below.
LC_COLLATE
setting. As any other compare function, returns a negative, or a
positive value, or 0, depending on whether string1
collates before or after string2 or is equal to it.
cmp(), and still returns locale-aware results. This function can be
used when the same string is compared repeatedly, e.g. when collating
a sequence of strings.
LC_NUMERIC
setting. The format follows the conventions of the % operator. For
floating point values, the decimal point is modified if
appropriate. If grouping is true, also takes the grouping into
account.
str(float), but takes the decimal point into
account.
LC_NUMERIC
settings.
LC_NUMERIC conventions.
string
dealing with case change their behaviour.
strcoll() and
strxfrm() of the locale module are affected.
time.strftime() follows these conventions.
localeconv() function.
posix.strerror() might
be affected by this category.
format(), atoi(), atof() and str() of the
locale module are affected by that category. All other numeric
formatting operations are not affected.
localeconv().
setlocale() fails.
Example:
>>> import locale
>>> locale.open(locale.LC_ALL,"de") #setting locale to German
>>> locale.strcoll("f\344n","foo") #comparing a string containing an umlaut
>>> can.close()
guido@CNRI.Reston.Va.US