Set the locale to the user’s default setting

[tom-kuca]

According to POSIX, a program which has not called setlocale(LC_ALL, '') runs using the portable 'C' locale. Calling setlocale(LC_ALL, '') lets it use the default locale as defined by the LANG variable.

Source: https://docs.python.org/3/library/locale.html#locale.getdefaultlocale

Applications typically start with a call of

import locale
locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, '')

Source: https://docs.python.org/3/library/locale.html#locale.setlocale

Setting the locale fixes the detection of 24h format.

Details

pretty_datetime function checks if time.strftime("%p") is empty for branching between 12h / 24h:

alot/alot/helper.py

Lines 216 to 217 in 3a3fc88

	ampm = d.strftime('%p').lower()
	if len(ampm):

According to the documentation above, the locale falls back to C and the format is always 12h. Here is the program to check the behavior:

Before

import datetime
import locale

print(locale.getlocale(locale.LC_TIME))
print(datetime.datetime.now().strftime("%p"))

Output:

$ LANG=cs_CZ.UTF-8 python ~/prg/python/time.py 
(None, None)
PM

After

import datetime
import locale

locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, '')    
print(locale.getlocale(locale.LC_TIME))
print(datetime.datetime.now().strftime("%p"))

Output:

$ LANG=cs_CZ.UTF-8 python ~/prg/python/time.py 
('cs_CZ', 'UTF-8')

Note that the format is blank.

$ python --version
Python 3.11.8

[pazz]

Thanks for the explanations and the patch! I am actually quite surprised that one has to do anything in order to cause the application to use the users default locale and did not notice that the 12h format was used regardless of the locale.
For me this looks good.