date i18n

[Lisa D'Aniello]

Hi there,

i have the following code, that works great in the US. I was hoping that it would also work great in the UK, but...
It returns US format in the UK. Any ideas as to why?

  SimpleDateFormat sdt = (SimpleDateFormat)DateFormat.getDateInstance(DateFormat.SHORT);
  String pat = sdt.toLocalizedPattern();
  pat = pat.replaceAll("yy*", "yyyy");
  sdt.applyLocalizedPattern(pat);
  sdt.format(new Date())

Thanks for any help you can offer,
Lisa

[Paul Sturrock]

What Locale is your UK machine configured to use? It may well be en_US too.

[Lisa D'Aniello]

I'm not sure. How do i find out?

[Paul Sturrock]

Just examine the result of Locale.getDefault(). That will tell you. Though the DateFormat stuff you are using usses the default anyway, so it does look liek your JVM is configuered for an en_US Locale.

[Lisa D'Aniello]

Thank you so very much! For a minute there i was afraid that I had the entire concept of date formats wrong!

[Barry Higgins]

I've run your code from Ireland and was surprised to find my default SHORT was set to M/d/yy.
After looking this up it appears the Locale has to be explicitly set. I thought the JVM might have some way of picking this up at start-up.

Anyway you can avoid all of this unpleasantness by specifying the Locale when you get your DataInstance.

SimpleDateFormat sdt = (SimpleDateFormat)DateFormat.getDateInstance(DateFormat.SHORT, Locale.US());

[Lisa D'Aniello]

Hi Barry,
Thanks for the code bit - i really appreciate it. I should not have to code for each locale of visitor I expect to see, since this should be as simple as getting the default date. I suppose that what I need to know is how to configure the JVM properly.

I appreciate everyones help - and if i ever figure out how to get it going, i'll post it back here for everyone else to use.

Originally posted by Barry Higgins:
I've run your code from Ireland and was surprised to find my default SHORT was set to M/d/yy.
After looking this up it appears the Locale has to be explicitly set. I thought the JVM might have some way of picking this up at start-up.

Anyway you can avoid all of this unpleasantness by specifying the Locale when you get your DataInstance.

SimpleDateFormat sdt = (SimpleDateFormat)DateFormat.getDateInstance(DateFormat.SHORT, Locale.US());