How to parse floats in Python from a source which uses a special known local format that has commas as decimal separators?
locale can do that, of course. But its documentation says:
It is generally a bad idea to call setlocale() in some library routine, since as a side effect it affects the entire program. Saving and restoring it is almost as bad: it is expensive and affects other threads that happen to run before the settings have been restored.
Simply replacing , by . is not such a great solution either.
Can a special locale in Python be used but only for a single parse operation?