pip install - locale.Error: unsupported locale setting

Question

Full stacktrace:

➜  ~ pip install virtualenv
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File \"/usr/bin/pip\", line 11, in 
    sys.exit(main())
           


        

Answer 1

[This answer is target on linux platform only]

The first thing you should know is most of the locale config file located path can be get from localedef --help :

$ localedef --help | tail -n 5
System's directory for character maps : /usr/share/i18n/charmaps
                       repertoire maps: /usr/share/i18n/repertoiremaps
                       locale path    : /usr/lib/locale:/usr/share/i18n
For bug reporting instructions, please see:

See the last /usr/share/i18n ? This is where your xx_XX.UTF-8 config file located:

$ ls /usr/share/i18n/locales/zh_*
/usr/share/i18n/locales/zh_CN  /usr/share/i18n/locales/zh_HK  /usr/share/i18n/locales/zh_SG  /usr/share/i18n/locales/zh_TW

Now what ? We need to compile them into archive binary. One of the way, e.g. assume I have /usr/share/i18n/locales/en_LOVE, I can add it into compile list, i.e. /etc/locale-gen file:

$ tail -1 /etc/locale.gen 
en_LOVE.UTF-8 UTF-8

And compile it to binary with sudo locale-gen:

$ sudo locale-gen 
Generating locales (this might take a while)...
  en_AG.UTF-8... done
  en_AU.UTF-8... done
  en_BW.UTF-8... done
  ...
  en_LOVE.UTF-8... done
Generation complete.

And now update the system default locale with desired LANG, LC_ALL ...etc with this update-locale:

sudo update-locale LANG=en_LOVE.UTF-8

update-locale actually also means to update this /etc/default/locale file which will source by system on login to setup environment variables:

$ head /etc/default/locale 
#  File generated by update-locale
LANG=en_LOVE.UTF-8
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
...

But we may not want to reboot to take effect, so we can just source it to environment variable in current shell session:

$ . /etc/default/locale

How about sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales ? If you play around it you will know this command basically act as GUI to simplify the above steps, i.e. Edit /etc/locale.gen -> sudo locale-gen -> sudo update-locale LANG=en_LOVE.UTF-8

For python, as long as /etc/locale.gen contains that locale candidate and locale.gen get compiled, setlocale(category, locale) should work without throws locale.Error: unsupoorted locale setting. You can check the correct string en_US.UTF-8/en_US/....etc to be set in setlocale(), by observing /etc/locale.gen file, and then uncomment and compile it as desired. zh_CN GB2312 without dot in that file means the correct string is zh_CN and zh_CN.GB2312.