locale.getlocale() problems on OSX

Question

I need to get the system locale to do a number of things, ultimately I want to translate my app using gettext. I am going to distribute it on both Linux and OSX, but I ran into problems on OSX Snow Leopard: ``` $ python Python 2.5.2 (r252:60911, Jan 4 2009, 17:40:26) [GCC 4.3.2] on linux2 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> import locale >>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, '') 'sv_SE.UTF-8' >>> locale.getlocale() ('sv_SE', 'UTF8') $ python Python 2.6.1 (r261:67515, Jul 7 2009, 23:51:51) [GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5646)] on darwin Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> import locale >>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, '') 'C' >>> locale.getlocale() (None, None) ``` Both systems are using Swedish languages. On Linux, the environment variable LANG is already set to "sv_SE.UTF-8". If I pass that variable to python on OSX (`LANG="sv_SE.UTF-8" python` instead), locale is detected nicely. But shouldn't `locale.getlo…

Accepted Answer

Odd on OSX (Smow Leopard 10.6.1) I get

```
$ python
Python 2.6.1 (r261:67515, Jul  7 2009, 23:51:51) 
[GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5646)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.  
>>> import locale
>>> locale.getlocale()
(None, None)
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, '')
'en_GB.UTF-8'
>>> locale.getlocale()
('en_GB', 'UTF8')
```

Edit:

I just found this on the apple python mailing list

Basically it depends on what is set in your environment at run time (one of LANG, LANGUAGE, LC_ALL) I had LANG=en_GB.UTF-8 in my shell environment

locale.getlocale() problems on OSX

Solution

Problem