The “local flavor” add-ons

Historically, Django has shipped with django.contrib.localflavor – assorted pieces of code that are useful for particular countries or cultures. This code is now distributed separately from Django, for easier maintenance and to trim the size of Django’s codebase.

The new localflavor package is named django-localflavor, with a main module called localflavor and many subpackages using an ISO 3166 country code. For example: localflavor.us is the localflavor package for the U.S.A.

Most of these localflavor add-ons are country-specific fields for the forms framework – for example, a USStateField that knows how to validate U.S. state abbreviations and a FISocialSecurityNumber that knows how to validate Finnish social security numbers.

To use one of these localized components, just import the relevant subpackage. For example, here’s how you can create a form with a field representing a French telephone number:

from django import forms
from localflavor.fr.forms import FRPhoneNumberField

class MyForm(forms.Form):
    my_french_phone_no = FRPhoneNumberField()

For documentation on a given country’s localflavor helpers, see its README file.

Supported countries

See the official documentation for more information:

Internationalization of localflavors

To activate translations for the localflavor application, you must include the application’s name in the INSTALLED_APPS setting, so the internationalization system can find the catalog, as explained in How Django discovers translations.

How to migrate

If you’ve used the old django.contrib.localflavor package or one of the temporary django-localflavor-* releases, follow these two easy steps to update your code:

  1. Install the third-party django-localflavor package from PyPI.

  2. Change your app’s import statements to reference the new package.

    For example, change this:

    from django.contrib.localflavor.fr.forms import FRPhoneNumberField
    

    ...to this:

    from localflavor.fr.forms import FRPhoneNumberField
    

The code in the new package is the same (it was copied directly from Django), so you don’t have to worry about backwards compatibility in terms of functionality. Only the imports have changed.

Deprecation policy

In Django 1.5, importing from django.contrib.localflavor will result in a DeprecationWarning. This means your code will still work, but you should change it as soon as possible.

In Django 1.6, importing from django.contrib.localflavor will no longer work.