PYL10N

Pyl10n is a localization (l10n) library for python, written in 2008-2010.

BEWARE: This is old code, migrated to git. Previously, this was found at: https://code.osso.nl/projects/pyl10n

SUMMARY

Pyl10n intends to replace the standard locale module which is not thread safe (locale.setlocale() updates the entire process’ locale settings). Pyl10n allows you to supply the language setting at conversion function call time or through a callback function that allows you to have a thread-specific language. E.g. for Django you could pass django.utils.translation.get_language which gets the currently selected language.

Its a complement to gettext solutions that do not depend on process-wide language settings.

PORTABILITY

Pyl10n has been tested with python 2.5 through 2.7 on Debian/Ubuntu Linux systems. It’s been known to work with Python 3 as well.

Python support before 2.7 cannot be guaranteed. Python support for 3 is not well tested.

TODO

The generated locale files should be packaged separately so you don’t need to fetch them when using pyl10n with only a handful of selected languages.

EXAMPLE

Import pyl10n as locale:

>>> import pyl10n as locale

Hardcode the current thread locale.

>>> locale.setlocale('nl_NL')
>>> print(locale.currency(12345.67))
€ 12345,67

Usually you’ll want to set a function that returns the current thread locale.

>>> getlocale = lambda: 'en_US'
>>> locale.setlocalefunc(getlocale)
>>> print(locale.format('%f', 12345.67, True, True))
12,345.67

If you’re using your own locale files, you may set up the path like this:

$ ls path/to/locale/en/ -1p
LC_ADDRESS
LC_MEASUREMENT
LC_MESSAGES/
LC_MONETARY
LC_NAME
LC_NUMERIC
LC_PAPER
LC_TELEPHONE
LC_TIME

>>> locale.setlocalepath('path/to/locale')
>>> locale.setlocale('en')
>>> locale.teldom2string((31, 50, 1234567))
'(50) 1234567'
>>> locale.setlocale('sv')
>>> locale.teldom2string((31, 50, 1234567))
'050-1234567'

The data files are stored/read using pickle.

TESTS

A quick selftest can be run:

$ python -c 'from pyl10n import selftest; selftest()'
...

Differences between the locale output and the pyl10n output may be attributed to an alternate/earlier source of locale date, or to custom adjustments (improvements) by me (to the Dutch or English locale files).

LIMITATIONS

As of this writing, it is not complete yet. It does implement format() and currency() correctly (see http://bugs.python.org/issue1222 ) and it has most of the time formatting support that strftime(3) specifies.

In the near future (ha ha) it will support address formatting functions.

Look at the lists of finished and unfinished functions in the source.