1. Command line and environment

If set to the value 0, causes the main Python command line application to skip coercing the legacy ASCII-based C and POSIX locales to a more capable UTF-8 based alternative.

If this variable is not set (or is set to a value other than 0), the LC_ALL locale override environment variable is also not set, and the current locale reported for the LC_CTYPE category is either the default C locale, or else the explicitly ASCII-based POSIX locale, then the Python CLI will attempt to configure the following locales for the LC_CTYPE category in the order listed before loading the interpreter runtime:

C.UTF-8

C.utf8

UTF-8

If setting one of these locale categories succeeds, then the LC_CTYPE environment variable will also be set accordingly in the current process environment before the Python runtime is initialized. This ensures that in addition to being seen by both the interpreter itself and other locale-aware components running in the same process (such as the GNU readline library), the updated setting is also seen in subprocesses (regardless of whether or not those processes are running a Python interpreter), as well as in operations that query the environment rather than the current C locale (such as Python’s own locale.getdefaultlocale()).

Configuring one of these locales (either explicitly or via the above implicit locale coercion) automatically enables the surrogateescape error handler for sys.stdin and sys.stdout (sys.stderr continues to use backslashreplace as it does in any other locale). This stream handling behavior can be overridden using PYTHONIOENCODING as usual.

For debugging purposes, setting PYTHONCOERCECLOCALE=warn will cause Python to emit warning messages on stderr if either the locale coercion activates, or else if a locale that would have triggered coercion is still active when the Python runtime is initialized.

Also note that even when locale coercion is disabled, or when it fails to find a suitable target locale, PYTHONUTF8 will still activate by default in legacy ASCII-based locales. Both features must be disabled in order to force the interpreter to use ASCII instead of UTF-8 for system interfaces.

Availability: Unix.

New in version 3.7: See PEP 538 for more details.