>>> help(locale) Help on module locale: NAME locale - Locale support. FILE c:\python27\lib\locale.py DESCRIPTION The module provides low-level access to the C lib's locale APIs and adds high level number formatting APIs as well as a locale aliasing engine to complement these. The aliasing engine includes support for many commonly used locale names and maps them to values suitable for passing to the C lib's setlocale() function. It also includes default encodings for all supported locale names. >>> import locale >>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, "") "Chinese (Simplified)_People's Republic of China.936" >>> lang, encoding = locale.getdefaultlocale() >>> print lang zh_CN >>> print encoding cp936 >>>