>>> import locale, _locale >>> _locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, 'en_AG') 'en_AG' >>> _locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE) 'en_AG' >>> locale.getlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE) Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> File "/home/serhiy/py/cpython/Lib/locale.py", line 575, in getlocale return _parse_localename(localename) File "/home/serhiy/py/cpython/Lib/locale.py", line 484, in _parse_localename raise ValueError('unknown locale: %s' % localename) ValueError: unknown locale: en_AG One solution is proposed in issue20079: map all supported in glibc locale names without encoding to locale names with encoding. But see issue20087. And default encoding can be different on other systems (not based on glibc). Other solution is not guess an encoding, but use locale.nl_langinfo(locale.CODESET) in locale.getlocale(). And left in locale alias table only nonstandard mappings (such as english_uk -> en_GB.ISO8859-1 and sr_yu.iso88595 -> sr_CS.ISO8859-5).

With #20079 closed but #20087 still open where do we stand with this issue?

For 3.5 this affects Windows as well, since the new CRT supports RFC1766 language codes, but only without a codepage spec: Python 3.5.0a1 (v3.5.0a1:5d4b6a57d5fd, Feb 7 2015, 18:15:14) [MSC v.1900 64 bit (AMD64)] on win32 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> import locale >>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, 'en-GB') 'en-GB' >>> locale.getlocale() Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> File "C:\Program Files\Python35\lib\locale.py", line 578, in getlocale return _parse_localename(localename) File "C:\Program Files\Python35\lib\locale.py", line 487, in _parse_localename raise ValueError('unknown locale: %s' % localename) ValueError: unknown locale: en-GB On Vista+ (since 3.5 drops XP support) the codepage can be queried easily via GetLocaleInfoEx: >>> from ctypes import * >>> LOCALE_IDEFAULTANSICODEPAGE = 0x1004 >>> GetLocaleInfoEx = WinDLL('kernel32').GetLocaleInfoEx >>> info = (c_wchar * 100)() >>> GetLocaleInfoEx("en-GB", LOCALE_IDEFAULTANSICODEPAGE, info, len(info)) 5 >>> info.value '1252' >>> GetLocaleInfoEx("zh-CN", LOCALE_IDEFAULTANSICODEPAGE, info, len(info)) 4 >>> info.value '936' Note that Windows follows the RFC spec here (not POSIX), using a hyphen instead of an underscore. This is a bit of tangent, but for the Windows full language_country.codepage form, the X-11 based locale_alias dict is generally useless. So, contrary to the docs, on Windows getlocale doesn't return the language code in RFC 1766 form. In some cases it does, but only by chance.

The locale_alias database was extended to support "en_AG" and many others, but I'd still prefer Serhiy's suggestion to not guess the codeset when checking the default LC_CTYPE category. Use locale.nl_langinfo(locale.CODESET), if it's available. In Windows, I'd prefer to never guess since the encoding for a BCP-47 locale name can be directly queried. But this issue can be restricted to POSIX. What to do in Windows is already being considered in more recent issues: bpo-23425, bpo-37945, and bpo-43115.