Python locale error: unsupported locale setting

Run following commands

export LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8" export LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8" sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales 

It will solve this.

Make sure to match the .UTF-8 part to the actual syntax found in the output of locale -a e.g. .utf8 on some systems.

According to this link, it solved by entering this command:

export LC_ALL=C

You probably do not have any de_DE locale available.

You can view a list of available locales with the locale -a command. For example, on my machine:

$ locale -a C C.UTF-8 en_AG en_AG.utf8 en_AU.utf8 en_BW.utf8 en_CA.utf8 en_DK.utf8 en_GB.utf8 en_HK.utf8 en_IE.utf8 en_IN en_IN.utf8 en_NG en_NG.utf8 en_NZ.utf8 en_PH.utf8 en_SG.utf8 en_US.utf8 en_ZA.utf8 en_ZM en_ZM.utf8 en_ZW.utf8 it_CH.utf8 it_IT.utf8 POSIX 

Note that if you want to set the locale to it_IT you must also specify the .utf8:

>>> import locale >>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, 'it_IT') # error! Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> File "/usr/lib/python2.7/locale.py", line 539, in setlocale return _setlocale(category, locale) locale.Error: unsupported locale setting >>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, 'it_IT.utf8') 'it_IT.utf8' 

To install a new locale use:

sudo apt-get install language-pack-id 

where id is the language code (taken from here)

After you have installed the locale you should follow Julien Palard advice and reconfigure the locales with:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales 

One of the above answer provides the solution:

export LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8" export LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8" sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales 

The problem with above solution is that it has to be done on the linux shell. However, if you are providing your code to work on the client machine then this is a bad approach. I also tried executing the above commands using os.system(), but still it doesn't work.

Solution that worked for me is

locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL,'en_US.UTF-8') 

More permanent solution would be to fill the missing values, in the output shown by command: locale

Output from locale is:

 $ locale LANG=en_US.utf8 LANGUAGE= LC_CTYPE="en_US.utf8" LC_NUMERIC=es_ES.utf8 LC_TIME=es_ES.utf8 LC_COLLATE="en_US.utf8" LC_MONETARY=es_ES.utf8 LC_MESSAGES="en_US.utf8" LC_PAPER=es_ES.utf8 LC_NAME="en_US.utf8" LC_ADDRESS="en_US.utf8" LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.utf8" LC_MEASUREMENT=es_ES.utf8 LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.utf8" LC_ALL= 

To Fill the missing values edit ~/.bashrc :

 $ vim ~/.bashrc 

Add the following lines after the above command (suppose you want en_US.UTF-8 to be your language):

export LANGUAGE="en_US.UTF-8" export LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8" 

If this file is ReadOnly you would be needing to follow the steps mentioned by The GeekyBoy. The answer given by Dr Beco in Superuser has details relating to saving readonly files.

After saving the file do:

$ source ~/.bashrc 

Now you wont be facing the same problem anymore.

If you're on a Debian (or Debian fork), you can add locales using :

dpkg-reconfigure locales 

You error clearly says, you are trying to use locale something was not there.

>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, 'de_DE') Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> File "/usr/lib/python2.7/locale.py", line 581, in setlocale return _setlocale(category, locale) locale.Error: unsupported locale setting 

locale.Error: unsupported locale setting

To check available setting, use locale -a

deb@deb-Latitude-E7470:/ambot$ locale -a C C.UTF-8 en_AG en_AG.utf8 en_AU.utf8 en_BW.utf8 en_CA.utf8 en_DK.utf8 en_GB.utf8 en_HK.utf8 en_IE.utf8 en_IN en_IN.utf8 en_NG en_NG.utf8 en_NZ.utf8 en_PH.utf8 en_SG.utf8 en_US.utf8 en_ZA.utf8 en_ZM en_ZM.utf8 en_ZW.utf8 POSIX 

so you can use one among,

>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, 'en_AG.utf8') 'en_AG.utf8' >>> 

for de_DE

This file can either be adjusted manually or updated using the tool, update-locale.

update-locale LANG=de_DE.UTF-8 

On Arch Linux I was able to fix this by running sudo locale-gen

For the record, I had this same problem, but none of the solutions worked. I had upgraded my computer and migrated my PC. I had a a mixed locale english and spanish:

$ locale LANG=en_US.utf8 LANGUAGE= LC_CTYPE="en_US.utf8" LC_NUMERIC=es_ES.utf8 LC_TIME=es_ES.utf8 LC_COLLATE="en_US.utf8" LC_MONETARY=es_ES.utf8 LC_MESSAGES="en_US.utf8" LC_PAPER=es_ES.utf8 LC_NAME="en_US.utf8" LC_ADDRESS="en_US.utf8" LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.utf8" LC_MEASUREMENT=es_ES.utf8 LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.utf8" LC_ALL= 

But, on my new Debian installation, I just selected english as locale. Which finally worked was to reconfigure locales package to add and generate spanish too.

$ grep -v "#" /etc/locale.gen en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8 es_ES.UTF-8 UTF-8 

In my opinion, the easiest way to setup the local locale in python{,3} is:

>>> import locale >>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, '') 'de_DE.UTF-8' 

Then, locale aware stuff just works, if you're on a decent linux distro, and should work on binary distributions of the other OSes as well (or that's a bug IMHO).

>>> import datetime as dt >>> print(dt.date.today().strftime("%A %d. %B %Y")) Sonntag 11. Dezember 2016 

Place it in the Dockerfile above the ENV.

# make the "en_US.UTF-8" locale so postgres will be utf-8 enabled by default RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y locales && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/* \ && localedef -i en_US -c -f UTF-8 -A /usr/share/locale/locale.alias en_US.UTF-8 ENV LANG en_US.UTF-8 

• run this command locale to get what locale is used. Such as:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_US:en
LC_CTYPE=zh_CN.UTF-8
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

• search for the listed locales list in first step in /etc/locale-gen file. Uncomment to used ones
• run locale-gen to generate newly added locales

Just open the .bashrc file and add this

export LC_ALL=C

and then type source .bashrc in terminal.

In trying to get python to spit out names in specific locale I landed here with same problem.

In pursuing the answer, things got a little mystical I find.

I found that python code.

import locale print locale.getdefaultlocale() >> ('en_DK', 'UTF-8') 

And indeed locale.setlocale(locale.LC_TIME, 'en_DK.UTF-8') works

Using tips here I tested further to see what is available using python code

import locale loc_list = [(a,b) for a,b in locale.locale_alias.items() ] loc_size = len(loc_list) print loc_size,'entries' for loc in loc_list: try: locale.setlocale(locale.LC_TIME, loc[1]) print 'SUCCES set {:12} ({})'.format(loc[1],loc[0]) except: pass 

which yields

858 entries SUCCES set en_US.UTF-8 (univ) SUCCES set C (c.ascii) SUCCES set C (c.en) SUCCES set C (posix-utf2) SUCCES set C (c) SUCCES set C (c_c) SUCCES set C (c_c.c) SUCCES set en_IE.UTF-8 (en_ie.utf8@euro) SUCCES set en_US.UTF-8 (universal.utf8@ucs4) SUCCES set C (posix) SUCCES set C (english_united-states.437) SUCCES set en_US.UTF-8 (universal) 

Of which only above is working! But the en_DK.UTF-8 is not in this list, though it works!?!? What?? And the python generated locale list do contain a lot of combos of da and DK, which I am looking for, but again no UTF-8 for da/DK...

I am on a Point Linux distro (Debian based), and here locale says amongst other LC_TIME="en_DK.UTF-8", which I know works, but not the locale I need.

locale -a says

C C.UTF-8 en_DK.utf8 en_US.utf8 POSIX 

So definitely need to install other locale, which i did by editing /etc/locale.gen, uncomment needed line da_DK.UTF-8 UTF-8 and run command locale-gen

Now locale.setlocale(locale.LC_TIME, 'da_DK.UTF-8') works too, and I can get my localized day and month names.

My Conclision:

Python : locale.locale_alias is not at all helpfull in finding available locales!!!

Linux : It is quite easy to get locale list and install new locale. A lot of help available.

Windows : I have been investigating a little, but nothing conclusive. There are though posts leading to answers, but I have not felt the urge to pursue it.

This error can occur, if you have just added a new locale. You need to restart the python interactive shell (quit() and python) to get access to it.

If I were you, I would use BABEL: http://babel.pocoo.org/en/latest/index.html

I got the same issue here using Docker, I've tried every single step and didn't work well, always getting locale error, so I decided to use BABEL, and everything worked well.

python looks for .UFT-8, but you probably have .utf8 try installing the .UFT-8 packages with sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

For those deploying a docker image and using a locale that isn't shown in the locale -a command, add this line to your Dockerfile
RUN apt-get install -y locales

This should add all locales to your image, I used de_DE which is not part of AWS default Ubuntu server.

if I understand correctly, the main source of error here is the exact syntax of the locale-name. Especially as it seems to differ between distributions. I've seen mentioned here in different answers/comments:

de_DE.utf8 de_DE.UTF-8 

Even though this is obviously the same for a human being, the same does not hold for your standard deterministic algorithm.

So you will probably do something along the lines of:

DESIRED_LOCALE=de DESIRED_LOCALE_COUNTRY=DE DESIRED_CODEPAGE_RE=\.[Uu][Tt][Ff].?8 if [ $(locale -a | grep -cE "${DESIRED_LOCALE}_${DESIRED_LOCALE_COUNTRY}${DESIRED_CODEPAGE_RE}") -eq 1 ] then export LC_ALL=$(locale -a | grep -m1 -E "${DESIRED_LOCALE}_${DESIRED_LOCALE_COUNTRY}${DESIRED_CODEPAGE_RE}") export LANG=$LC_ALL else echo "Not exactly one desired locale definition found: $(locale -a | grep -E "${DESIRED_LOCALE}_${DESIRED_LOCALE_COUNTRY}${DESIRED_CODEPAGE_RE}")" >&2 fi 

The error you're encountering when trying to set the locale in Python is due to the absence of the specified de_DE locale on your Ubuntu 11.04 system.

You can easily resolve this by following this steps:

1. Try generating the de_DE locale using this command

sudo locale-gen de_DE sudo locale-gen de_DE.UTF-8 sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales 

2. You can then go ahead and verify if you have correctly installed it after generating the locale using this command

locale -a | grep de_DE 

3. try importing it again to see if this work

import locale locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, 'de_DE.UTF-8') 

first, make sure you have the language pack installed by doing :

sudo apt-get install language-pack-en-base sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales 

Not the answer for this question but this question helped me to find the answer for my problem.

I had this problem when using inside a Docker container.
I solved by installing locales, adding my language to the locale.gen file, executing locale-gen (it reads from locale.gen) and finally setting LANG to my language.

For example, my Dockerfile:

RUN apt-get install -y locales RUN echo "pt_BR.UTF-8 UTF-8" >> /etc/locale.gen RUN locale-gen pt_BR.UTF-8 ENV LANG=pt_BR.UTF-8