How to get unicode month name in Python?

Question

I am trying to get a unicode version of `calendar.month_abbr[6]`. If I don't specify an encoding for the locale, I don't know how to convert the string to unicode. The example code below shows my problem: ``` >>> import locale >>> import calendar >>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, ("ru_RU")) 'ru_RU' >>> print repr(calendar.month_abbr[6]) '\xb8\xee\xdd' >>> print repr(calendar.month_abbr[6].decode("utf8")) Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 1, in File "/usr/lib/python2.5/encodings/utf_8.py", line 16, in decode return codecs.utf_8_decode(input, errors, True) UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xb8 in position 0: unexpected code byte >>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, ("ru_RU", "utf8")) 'ru_RU.UTF8' >>> print repr(calendar.month_abbr[6]) '\xd0\x98\xd1\x8e\xd0\xbd' >>> print repr(calendar.month_abbr[6].decode("utf8")) u'\u0418\u044e\u043d' ``` Any ideas how to solve this? The solution doesn't have to look like this. Any solution that gives m…

Accepted Answer

Change the last line in your code:

```
>>> print calendar.month_abbr[6].decode("utf8")
Июн
```

Improperly used `repr()` hides from you that you already get what you needed.

Also `getlocale()` can be used to get encoding for current locale:

```
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, 'en_US')
'en_US'
>>> locale.getlocale()
('en_US', 'ISO8859-1')
```

Another modules that might be useful for you:

- PyICU - a better way for internationalization. While `locale` produce either initial or inflected form of month name depending on locale database in your OS (so you can't rely on it for such languages like Russian!) and uses some encoding, `PyICU` has different format specifiers for initial and inflected form (so you can select appropriate in your case) and uses unicode.

- pytils - a set of tools to work with Russian language, including dates. It has hard-coded month names as workaround for `locale` limitations.

How to get unicode month name in Python?

Solution

Problem