Python locale error: unsupported locale setting

Question

Why do I get the following error when doing this in python:

>>> import locale
>>> print str( locale.getlocale() )
(None, None)
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, 'de_DE')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/locale.py", line 531, in setlocale
    return _setlocale(category, locale)
locale.Error: unsupported locale setting

This works with other locales like fr or nl as well. I'm using Ubuntu 11.04.

Update: Doing the following did not yield anything:

dpkg-reconfigure locales
perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
    LANGUAGE = (unset),
    LC_ALL = (unset),
    LC_CTYPE = "UTF-8",
    LANG = (unset)
    are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory

Answer 1

Run following commands

export LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

It will solve this.

Make sure to match the .UTF-8 part to the actual syntax found in the output of locale -a e.g. .utf8 on some systems.