# locale --- Internationalization services

> synopsis: Internationalization services. Source code: Lib/locale.py The !locale module opens access to the POSIX locale database and functionality. The POSIX locale mechanism allows programmers to deal with certain cultural issues in an application, without requiring the programmer to know all the s

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- Updated: `2026-08-16T09:32:14.543015+00:00`
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## Knowledge

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synopsis: Internationalization services.

Source code: Lib/locale.py

The !locale module opens access to the POSIX locale database and functionality. The POSIX locale mechanism allows programmers to deal with certain cultural issues in an application, without requiring the programmer to know all the specifics of each country where the software is executed.

The !locale module is implemented on top of the !_locale module, which in turn uses an ANSI C locale implementation if available.

The !locale module defines the following exception and functions

Exception raised when the locale passed to setlocale is not recognized.

If locale is given and not None, setlocale modifies the locale setting for the category. The available categories are listed in the data description below. locale may be a string , or a pair, language code and encoding. An empty string specifies the user's default settings. If the modification of the locale fails, the exception Error is raised. If successful, the new locale setting is returned.

If locale is a pair, it is converted to a locale name using the locale aliasing engine. The language code has the same format as a locale name , but without encoding. The language code and encoding can be None.

If locale is omitted or None, the current setting for category is returned.

setlocale is not thread-safe on most systems. Applications typically start with a call of

This sets the locale for all categories to the user's default setting (typically specified in the LANG environment variable). If the locale is not changed thereafter, using multithreading should not cause problems.

Returns the database of the local conventions as a dictionary. This dictionary has the following strings as keys

All numeric values can be set to CHAR_MAX to indicate that there is no value specified in this locale.

The possible values for 'p_sign_posn' and 'n_sign_posn' are given below.

The function temporarily sets the LC_CTYPE locale to the LC_NUMERIC locale or the LC_MONETARY locale if locales are different and numeric or monetary strings are non-ASCII. This temporary change affects other threads. …

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