# Controlling localization

Django-tables2 allows you to define which column of a table should or should not be localized. For example you may want to use this feature in following use cases:

- You want to format some columns representing for example numeric values in the given locales even if you don’t enable `USE_L10N` in your settings file.

- You don’t want to format primary key values in your table even if you enabled `USE_L10N` in your settings file.

This control is done by using two filter functions in Django’s `l10n` library named `localize` and `unlocalize`. Check out Django docs about `localization` for more information about them.

There are two ways of controlling localization in your columns.

First one is setting the `localize` attribute in your column definition to `True` or `False`. Like so:

    class PersonTable(tables.Table):
       id = tables.Column(accessor="pk", localize=False)
       class Meta:
           model = Person

Note

The default value of the `localize` attribute is `None` which means the formatting of columns is depending on the `USE_L10N` setting.

The second way is to define a `localize` and/or `unlocalize` tuples in your tables Meta class (like with `fields` or `exclude`). You can do this like so:

    class PersonTable(tables.Table):
       id = tables.Column(accessor='pk')
       value = tables.Column(accessor='some_numerical_field')
       class Meta:
           model = Person
           unlocalize = ("id", )
           localize = ("value", )

If you define the same column in both `localize` and `unlocalize` then the value of this column will be ‘unlocalized’ which means that `unlocalize` has higher precedence.