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Some values in the dict returned by localeconv() may be non-ASCII
strings, yet they are not decoded according to the locale's character
set. This can be observed when the currency symbol is the euro sign:
>>> import locale
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_MONETARY, 'fr_FR.UTF-8')
'fr_FR.UTF-8'
>>> locale.localeconv()['currency_symbol']
'\xe2\x82\xac'
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_MONETARY, 'fr_FR.ISO8859-15')
'fr_FR.ISO8859-15'
>>> locale.localeconv()['currency_symbol']
'\xa4'
localeconv() is defined in the _locale module, which has no knowledge of
the current encoding - but the locale module does. So we could redefine
localeconv() in locale as a wrapper, to do the proper encoding dance.