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Consider this transcript from OS X 10.6:
>>> import locale
>>> locale.getlocale()
(None, None)
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, _)
'C'
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, 'en_US.UTF-8')
'en_US.UTF-8'
>>> locale.getlocale()
('en_US', 'UTF8')
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, _)
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
 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
>>> 
OS X does not recognize 'en_US.UTF8', only 'en_US.UTF-8'. However, when passed a tuple, the locale module tries to normalize the values. It ends up turning the result of getlocale from ('en_US', 'UTF-8') into 'en_US.UTF8'.