diff options
Diffstat (limited to 'Doc')
-rw-r--r-- | Doc/library/locale.rst | 19 |
1 files changed, 8 insertions, 11 deletions
diff --git a/Doc/library/locale.rst b/Doc/library/locale.rst index 630833a..6cfe025 100644 --- a/Doc/library/locale.rst +++ b/Doc/library/locale.rst @@ -498,26 +498,23 @@ is almost as bad: it is expensive and affects other threads that happen to run before the settings have been restored. If, when coding a module for general use, you need a locale independent version -of an operation that is affected by the locale (such as :func:`string.lower`, or +of an operation that is affected by the locale (such as certain formats used with :func:`time.strftime`), you will have to find a way to do it without using the standard library routine. Even better is convincing yourself that using locale settings is okay. Only as a last resort should you document that your module is not compatible with non-\ ``C`` locale settings. -.. index:: module: string - -The case conversion functions in the :mod:`string` module are affected by the -locale settings. When a call to the :func:`setlocale` function changes the -:const:`LC_CTYPE` settings, the variables ``string.lowercase``, -``string.uppercase`` and ``string.letters`` are recalculated. Note that code -that uses these variable through ':keyword:`from` ... :keyword:`import` ...', -e.g. ``from string import letters``, is not affected by subsequent -:func:`setlocale` calls. - The only way to perform numeric operations according to the locale is to use the special functions defined by this module: :func:`atof`, :func:`atoi`, :func:`format`, :func:`str`. +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. + .. _embedding-locale: |