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The locale modules lets Python software select various
conversions and display conventions that are localized to a particular
country or language. However, the module was careful to not change
the numeric locale because various functions in Python's
implementation required that the numeric locale remain set to the
'C' locale. Often this was because the code was using the C library's
atof() function.
Not setting the numeric locale caused trouble for extensions that used
third-party C libraries, however, because they wouldn't have the
correct locale set. The motivating example was GTK+, whose user
interface widgets weren't displaying numbers in the current locale.
The solution described in the PEP is to add three new functions to the
Python API that perform ASCII-only conversions, ignoring the locale
setting:
- PyOS_ascii_strtod(str, ptr)
and PyOS_ascii_atof(str, ptr)
both convert a string to a C double.
- PyOS_ascii_formatd(buffer, buf_len, format, d) converts a double to an ASCII string.
The code for these functions came from the GLib library
(http://developer.gnome.org/arch/gtk/glib.html), whose
developers kindly relicensed the relevant functions and donated them
to the Python Software Foundation. The locale module
can now change the numeric locale, letting extensions such as GTK+
produce the correct results.
See About this document... for information on suggesting changes.
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