Thank you for calling locale.resetlocale() before exiting.

Maybe there should be a context manager?

Absolutely. It's not that hard to write your own though:

    import locale
    from contextlib import contextmanager

    @contextmanager
    def use_locale(*args, **kwargs):
        locale.setlocale(*args, **kwargs)
        yield
        locale.resetlocale()

Contextlib is one of the under-appreciated gems in Python: https://docs.python.org/3/library/contextlib.html#contextlib...

> Maybe there should be a context manager?

Even despite the:

> Absolutely.

My absolute least favorite response to this is:

> It's not that hard to write your own though:

The alternative is trying to get one merged into the standard library. At least writing your own is better than not having one!

I often see this answer as a reason it's not particularly important to have on in a standard library.

I strongly disagree with that sentiment as often these simple things have subtle gotchas, and/or subtle differences in possible net effects creating much bigger problems than their diminutive implementations would suggest.

I generally feel the same way as you. My comment about getting it merged was not meant to imply that it shouldn't get merged, but that it might be difficult to. I find it very hard to predict which of these small QoL features will be accepted by the core devs and which features will be rejected for some reason or other.

Does not really help parallel code

Use a global lock in the context manager.

Or use a programming language that doesn't rely on libc for locales.

Well dang: https://docs.python.org/3.12/library/locale.html

> There is no way to perform case conversions and character classifications according to the locale. For (Unicode) text strings these are done according to the character value only, while for byte strings, the conversions and classifications are done according to the ASCII value of the byte, and bytes whose high bit is set (i.e., non-ASCII bytes) are never converted or considered part of a character class such as letter or whitespace.

I actually like that python doesn't do locale aware case conversions. You can use ICU* for that, though it shows more warts (like the i in republic and that you have to handle Chinese banknotes differently as well):

  % env - LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 PATH="$PATH" python3
  Python 3.8.12 (default, Nov 13 2021, 10:49:08) 
  [Clang 11.0.3 (clang-1103.0.32.62)] on darwin
  Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
  >>> from icu import UnicodeString, Locale
  >>> s = b'the Republic of T\xc3\xbcrkiye'
  >>> s = s.decode()
  >>> s
  'the Republic of Türkiye'
  >>> lc = Locale("TR")
  >>> s = UnicodeString(s)
  >>> s
  <UnicodeString: 'the Republic of Türkiye'>
  >>> s = s.toUpper(lc)
  >>> s
  <UnicodeString: 'THE REPUBLİC OF TÜRKİYE'>
  >>> s = str(s)
  >>> s
  'THE REPUBLİC OF TÜRKİYE'
  >>> s.encode()
  b'THE REPUBL\xc4\xb0C OF T\xc3\x9cRK\xc4\xb0YE'
  >>> s = UnicodeString(s)
  >>> lc = Locale("CN")
  >>> s = s.toLower(lc)
  >>> s
  <UnicodeString: 'the republi̇c of türki̇ye'>
  >>> s = '壹,貳,參,肆,伍,陸,柒,捌,玖,拾,佰,仟,萬'
  >>> s.encode()
  b'\xe5\xa3\xb9,\xe8\xb2\xb3,\xe5\x8f\x83,\xe8\x82\x86,\xe4\xbc\x8d,\xe9\x99\xb8,\xe6\x9f\x92,\xe6\x8d\x8c,\xe7\x8e\x96,\xe6\x8b\xbe,\xe4\xbd\xb0,\xe4\xbb\x9f,\xe8\x90\xac'
  >>> s = UnicodeString(s)
  >>> s
  <UnicodeString: '壹,貳,參,肆,伍,陸,柒,捌,玖,拾,佰,仟,萬'>
  >>> s = s.toLower(lc)
  >>> s
  <UnicodeString: '壹,貳,參,肆,伍,陸,柒,捌,玖,拾,佰,仟,萬'>

* https://pypi.org/project/PyICU/

edit: Oh neat there's a hansfin keyword that I had not known about.

https://unicode-org.github.io/icu/userguide/locale/#keywords

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6224177/how-to-convert-e...

Definitely odd, I did a bit more checking in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32070549