Python 2.3 (#1, Jul 30 2003, 11:19:43) 
[GCC 3.2] on linux2 
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more 
information. 
>>> import locale as lo 
>>> lo.setlocale(lo.LC_ALL, 'de') 
Traceback (most recent call last): 
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ? 
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.3/locale.py", line 381, in 
setlocale 
    return _setlocale(category, locale) 
locale.Error: locale setting not supported 
 
The above was taken from the example section of the 
locale module documentation. 
 
But this works: 
 
>>> lo.setlocale(lo.LC_ALL, 'de_DE') 
'de_DE' 
>>> 
 
So the error message should at least be changed to 
"unknown/unsupported locale" and the documentation 
example updated to 'de_DE' instead of 'de'. 
 
However, if there are no side effects, I'd prefer to 
change the locale.setlocale() implementation to always 
normalize() the locale: 
 
def setlocale(category, locale=None): 
    if locale: 
        if type(locale) is not type(""): 
            # convert to string 
            locale = _build_localename(locale) 
        locale = normalize(locale) 
    return _setlocale(category, locale)