I found that the currency formatting does not work correctly for all locales. For example:

{{{
import locale

amount = 24.99
locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, 'it_IT.UTF-8')

price = locale.currency(amount)

print(price)
}}}

returns "€ 24,99".
It should return "24,99 €", just like noted at http://publications.europa.eu/code/it/it-370303.htm
under "Posizione del simbolo (€) negli importi in cifre".

What does locale.localeconv() return?

>>> locale.localeconv()
{'int_curr_symbol': '', 'currency_symbol': '', 'mon_decimal_point': '', 'mon_thousands_sep': '', 'mon_grouping': [], 'positive_sign': '', 'negative_sign': '', 'int_frac_digits': 127, 'frac_digits': 127, 'p_cs_precedes': 127, 'p_sep_by_space': 127, 'n_cs_precedes': 127, 'n_sep_by_space': 127, 'p_sign_posn': 127, 'n_sign_posn': 127, 'decimal_point': '.', 'thousands_sep': '', 'grouping': []}
>>>

In particular, the values of p_cs_precedes and n_cs_precedes.

>>> locale.localeconv()
{'int_curr_symbol': 'EUR ', 'currency_symbol': '€', 'mon_decimal_point': ',', 'mon_thousands_sep': '.', 'mon_grouping': [3, 3, 0], 'positive_sign': '', 'negative_sign': '-', 'int_frac_digits': 2, 'frac_digits': 2, 'p_cs_precedes': 1, 'p_sep_by_space': 1, 'n_cs_precedes': 1, 'n_sep_by_space': 1, 'p_sign_posn': 1, 'n_sign_posn': 1, 'decimal_point': ',', 'thousands_sep': '.', 'grouping': [3, 3, 0]}

p_cs_precedes == 1 means "the currency_symbol or int_curr_symbol strings should precede the value of a monetary amount", per https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Currency-Symbol.html (I couldn't find a more authoritative source, but I think this is okay).

So it looks like Python is following the rules correctly. I don't know how you'd adjust the locale values.

And just to show that python is doing the right thing, if the locale is set up correctly, I'll show the following hack:

>>> import locale
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, 'en_US')
'en_US'
>>> locale.currency(24.99)
'$24.99'
>>> locale._override_localeconv["p_cs_precedes"] = 0
>>> locale.currency(24.99)
'24.99$'

Notice the change from '$24.99' to '24.99$' when I change p_cs_precedes to 0.

WARNING: you really, really shouldn't use _override_localeconv. It looks like it exists just for testing, but I'm using it here to show that currency formatting does respect p_cs_precedes.

On the other hand, I've often wanted to build up a locale programmatically and then use it, so maybe we should support that use case.