This issue tracker has been migrated to GitHub, and is currently read-only.
For more information, see the GitHub FAQs in the Python's Developer Guide.

classification
Title: locale module example is wrong for some platforms
Type: Stage:
Components: Documentation Versions: Python 3.10
process
Status: open Resolution:
Dependencies: Superseder:
Assigned To: docs@python Nosy List: docs@python, smarie
Priority: normal Keywords:

Created on 2022-04-01 13:45 by smarie, last changed 2022-04-11 14:59 by admin.

Messages (1)
msg416487 - (view) Author: Sylvain Marie (smarie) * Date: 2022-04-01 13:45
The example in the doc shows

```python
>>> import locale
>>> loc = locale.getlocale()  # get current locale
# use German locale; name might vary with platform
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, 'de_DE')
>>> locale.strcoll('f\xe4n', 'foo')  # compare a string containing an umlaut
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, '')   # use user's preferred locale
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, 'C')  # use default (C) locale
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, loc)  # restore saved locale
```

However locale.getlocale() does not return the locale for all categories (locale.LC_ALL is even not allowed) but the locale for the LC_CTYPE category.

Therefore restoring it using `locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, loc)` does not actually restore the initial settings, and may even fail on some platforms (on mine it does).

The correct example should have the first line of code replaced with

```
>>> loc = locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL)  # get current locale
```

Note: this issue was first reported in the `pandas` library at https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas/issues/46595
History
Date User Action Args
2022-04-11 14:59:57adminsetgithub: 91343
2022-04-01 13:45:07smariecreate