[Python-Dev] PEP 540: Add a new UTF-8 mode (v2) (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Wed Dec 6 01:15:29 EST 2017

On 6 December 2017 at 15:59, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Dec 6, 2017 at 4:46 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

Something I've just noticed that needs to be clarified: on Linux, "C" locale and "POSIX" locale are aliases, but this isn't true in general (e.g. it's not the case on *BSD systems, including Mac OS X). For those of us with little to no BSD/MacOS experience, can you give a quick run-down of the differences between "C" and "POSIX"?

The one that's relevant to default locale detection is just the string that "setlocale(LC_CTYPE, NULL)" returns.

On Linux (or, more accurately, with glibc), after setting "LC_CTYPE=POSIX", that call still returns "C" (since the "POSIX" locale is defined as an alias for the "C" locale).

By contrast, on *BSD, it will return "POSIX" (since "POSIX" is actually a distinct locale there).

Beyond that, I don't know what the actual functional differences are.

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan at gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia

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