Dimitry's patch looks good, I added my patch before checking if there already is patch.

The only thing that might be cause discussion is when to accept 'UTF-8' as a valid locale name.  My patch only accepts in on OSX, while Dimitry's patch accepts it everywwhere.

Writing this I'm slightly in favour of Dimitry's approach: I quite often run into problems when using SSH to log in to a Linux box from my OSX laptop (with LC_CTYPE=UTF-8). Almost everything works correctly, except for Python code that uses the locale module (which craps out with the exception in the first message in this issue).

IMHO Dimitry's patch should be applied as is.