locale setting fails on Mac OS X

[Tim Radvan]

When initialising the lp() class on Mac OS, the locale setting fails.

I compiled link-grammar and the python bindings by following the instructions in the FAQ here: https://answers.launchpad.net/pylinkgrammar/+faq/336

Here is the output of the example script:
$ python example1.py
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "example1.py", line 2, in <module>
    parser = lp()
  File "/Users/tim/Code/build/linkgrammar.py", line 8, in __init__
    locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL,"en_US.UTF8")
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/locale.py", line 494, in setlocale
    return _setlocale(category, locale)
locale.Error: unsupported locale setting
Cleaning up linkgrammar...
Deleting <class 'linkgrammar.lp'>
Exception AttributeError: 'parse_options' in <bound method lp.__del__ of <linkgrammar.lp object at 0x10049ce10>> ignored

I fixed the problem by enclosing the locale setting in a try block as follows:
try:
    locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL,"en_US.UTF8")
except Exception, e:
    print 'Could not set locale:', e

The program then runs and parses the sentence correctly, but gives the output:
Could not set locale: unsupported locale setting

The problem disappears completely if the line is changed to:
locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL,"")

I don't really know what this line does, but should it be fixed some other way?

If this is a problem with my setup or you don't consider this a bug, please convert it to a question or delete it as necessary. I'm using Mac OS X 10.6.4.
Thanks!