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Do you believe this program should work?
import locale, os
for l in open("/usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED"):
 alias, encoding = l.strip().split()
 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, alias)
 try:
 enc = locale.getlocale()[1]
 except ValueError:
 continue # not in table
 normalized = enc.replace("ISO", "ISO-"). \
 replace("_", "-"). \
 replace("euc", "EUC-"). \
 replace("big5", "big5-").upper()
 assert normalized == locale.nl_langinfo(locale.CODESET)
After my change it does—the encoding returned from getlocale() is the one actually being used by glibc. It fails dramatically on earlier versions of Python (for example on the en_IN example from #29571.) I don't understand why Python needs to editorialize whatever choices libc or the system administrator has made.
Is getlocale() expected to return something different from the underlying C locale?
In fact, why have this table at all instead of using nl_langinfo to return the encoding for the current locale?