Locale Data

While message catalogs allow you to localize any messages in your application, there are a number of strings that are used in many applications for which translations are readily available.

Imagine for example you have a list of countries that users can choose from, and you’d like to display the names of those countries in the language the user prefers. Instead of translating all those country names yourself in your application, you can make use of the translations provided by the locale data included with Babel, which is based on the Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR) developed and maintained by the Unicode Consortium.

The Locale Class

You normally access such locale data through the Locale class provided by Babel:

>>> from babel import Locale
>>> locale = Locale('en', 'US')
>>> locale.territories['US']
u'United States'
>>> locale = Locale('es', 'MX')
>>> locale.territories['US']
u'Estados Unidos'

In addition to country/territory names, the locale data also provides access to names of languages, scripts, variants, time zones, and more. Some of the data is closely related to number and date formatting.

Most of the corresponding Locale properties return dictionaries, where the key is a code such as the ISO country and language codes. Consult the API documentation for references to the relevant specifications.

Likely Subtags

When dealing with locales you can run into the situation where a locale tag is not fully descriptive. For instance people commonly refer to zh_TW but that identifier does not resolve to a locale that the CLDR covers. Babel’s locale identifier parser in that case will attempt to resolve the most likely subtag to end up with the intended locale:

>>> from babel import Locale
>>> Locale.parse('zh_TW')
Locale('zh', territory='TW', script='Hant')

This can also be used to find the most appropriate locale for a territory. In that case the territory code needs to be prefixed with und (unknown language identifier):

>>> Locale.parse('und_AZ')
Locale('az', territory='AZ', script='Latn')
>>> Locale.parse('und_DE')
Locale('de', territory='DE')

Babel currently cannot deal with fuzzy locales (a locale not fully backed by data files) so we only accept locales that are fully backed by CLDR data. This will change in the future, but for the time being this restriction is in place.

Locale Display Names

Locales itself can be used to describe the locale itself or other locales. This mainly means that given a locale object you can ask it for its canonical display name, the name of the language and other things. Since the locales cross-reference each other you can ask for locale names in any language supported by the CLDR:

>>> l = Locale.parse('de_DE')
>>> l.get_display_name('en_US')
u'German (Germany)'
>>> l.get_display_name('fr_FR')
u'allemand (Allemagne)'

Display names include all the information to uniquely identify a locale (language, territory, script and variant) which is often not what you want. You can also ask for the information in parts:

>>> l.get_language_name('de_DE')
u'Deutsch'
>>> l.get_language_name('it_IT')
u'tedesco'
>>> l.get_territory_name('it_IT')
u'Germania'
>>> l.get_territory_name('pt_PT')
u'Alemanha'

Calendar Display Names

The Locale class provides access to many locale display names related to calendar display, such as the names of weekdays or months.

These display names are of course used for date formatting, but can also be used, for example, to show a list of months to the user in their preferred language:

>>> locale = Locale('es')
>>> month_names = locale.months['format']['wide'].items()
>>> for idx, name in sorted(month_names):
...     print name
enero
febrero
marzo
abril
mayo
junio
julio
agosto
septiembre
octubre
noviembre
diciembre