[Python-Dev] What is test__locale supposed to test, anyhow? (original) (raw)

Nick Bastin nbastin at opnet.com
Thu Jul 15 16:42:46 CEST 2004

On Jul 15, 2004, at 7:07 AM, Jack Jansen wrote:

On 15 Jul 2004, at 07:02, Nick Bastin wrote:

But not on OS X. It raises TestSkipped saying how locale support is so minimal that it isn't worth testing.

Yeah, I'm going remove that and test it out...that message may be bogus at this point - it was put there a year and a half ago by Jack, and I'm reasonably sure that no one's tested it since (and I don't believe it anyhow - it's more like Python's support is bad - MacOS X's support for locale is pretty good). MacOSX's support for locale was abysmal up to 10.2, a trait which it inherited from FreeBSD. It is much better under 10.3 (but still completely separate from the MacOSX native way to specify currency signs and what have you). But it seems the C library doesn't use the locale info, here's the output from testlocale (from cvs head, on 10.3.4):

No, this is something broken in Python - I just haven't figured out what. If you were to write a small test program in C, you would see that the locale information you get from the C library is correct.
However, something in Python is screwing this up, because calling setlocale() in python has almost no effect whatsoever on the data returned by localeconv(). (See previous messages in the thread for RADIXCHAR issues, specifically)

-- Nick

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list