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# Locales

agate strives to work equally well for users from all parts of the world. This means properly handling foreign currencies, date formats, etc. To facilitate this, agate makes a hard distinction between your locale and the locale of the data you are working with. This allows you to work seamlessly with data from other countries.

## Set your locale

Setting your locale will change how numbers are displayed when you print an agate `Table` or serialize it to, for example, a CSV file. This works the same as it does for any other Python module. See the `locale` documentation for details. Changing your locale will not affect how they are parsed from the files you are using. To change how data is parsed see Specify locale of numbers.

## Specify locale of numbers

To correctly parse numbers from non-US locales, you must pass a `locale` parameter to the `Number` constructor. For example, to parse Dutch numbers (which use a period to separate thousands and a comma to separate fractions):

    dutch_numbers = agate.Number(locale='nl_NL')

    column_names = ['city', 'population']
    column_types = [text_type, dutch_numbers]

    table = agate.Table.from_csv('dutch_cities.csv', columns)