Change locale for Google Colab

Question

I want to change the local setting (to change the date format) in GoogleCollab

The following works for me in JupyterNotebook but not in GoogleColab:

locale.setlocale(locale.LC_TIME, 'de_DE.UTF-8')

It always returns the error: unsupported locale setting

I have already looked at many other solutions and tried everything. One solution to change only the time zone I have seen is this one:

'!rm /etc/localtime
!ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/Asia/Bangkok /etc/localtime
!date

Answer 1

I figured this one out after a long time:

1. In Colab, you will have to install the desired locales. You do this with:
   !sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales
   • This will prompt for a numeric input, e.g. 268 and 269 for Hungarian.
     So you enter 268 269.
   • It will also prompt for the default locale, after installation. Here you will need to select your desired custom locale. This time, it is a numeric selection out of 3-5 options, depending, on how many have you selected at the previous step. In my case, I have selected 3, and the default locale became hu_HU.
2. You need to restart the Colab runtime: Ctrl + M then .
3. You need to activate the locale:
   import locale
locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, 'hu_HU') <- make sure you do it for the LC_ALL context.
4. The custom locale is now ready to use with pandas:
   pd.to_datetime('2021-01-01').day_name() returns Friday, but
   pd.to_datetime('2021-01-01').day_name('hu_HU') returns Péntek