How to get unicode month name in Python?

Question

I am trying to get a unicode version of calendar.month_abbr[6]. If I don't specify an encoding for the locale, I don't know how to convert the string to unicode. The example code below shows my problem:

>>> import locale
>>> import calendar
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, ("ru_RU"))
'ru_RU'
>>> print repr(calendar.month_abbr[6])
'\xb8\xee\xdd'
>>> print repr(calendar.month_abbr[6].decode("utf8"))
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/encodings/utf_8.py", line 16, in decode
    return codecs.utf_8_decode(input, errors, True)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xb8 in position 0: unexpected code byte
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, ("ru_RU", "utf8"))
'ru_RU.UTF8'
>>> print repr(calendar.month_abbr[6])
'\xd0\x98\xd1\x8e\xd0\xbd'
>>> print repr(calendar.month_abbr[6].decode("utf8"))
u'\u0418\u044e\u043d'

Any ideas how to solve this? The solution doesn't have to look like this. Any solution that gives me the abbreviated month name in unicode is fine.

Denis Otkidach · Accepted Answer · 2009-12-01 09:20:59Z

12

Change the last line in your code:

>>> print calendar.month_abbr[6].decode("utf8")
Июн

Improperly used repr() hides from you that you already get what you needed.

Also getlocale() can be used to get encoding for current locale:

>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, 'en_US')
'en_US'
>>> locale.getlocale()
('en_US', 'ISO8859-1')

Another modules that might be useful for you:

PyICU - a better way for internationalization. While locale produce either initial or inflected form of month name depending on locale database in your OS (so you can't rely on it for such languages like Russian!) and uses some encoding, PyICU has different format specifiers for initial and inflected form (so you can select appropriate in your case) and uses unicode.
pytils - a set of tools to work with Russian language, including dates. It has hard-coded month names as workaround for locale limitations.

edited Dec 1, 2009 at 9:20

answered Nov 30, 2009 at 17:48

Denis Otkidach

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1 Comment

Rickard Lindberg Over a year ago

If the unicode conversion succeeded I should still be able to do a repr on it. So that shouldn't be the problem. Thanks for the links. I will check them out.

tzot · Accepted Answer · 2009-11-30 21:03:47Z

0

What you need is:

…
myencoding= locale.getpreferredencoding()
print repr(calendar.month_abbr[6].decode(myencoding))
…

answered Nov 30, 2009 at 21:03

tzot

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2 Comments

Rickard Lindberg Over a year ago

On my machine locale.getpreferredencoding() returns utf8. So I still have the same problem.

Rickard Lindberg Over a year ago

It doesn't seem like locale.getpreferredencoding() returns the encoding that month_abbr names are encoded in.

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