The i18n Cookbook - recipies for a global society

Problem:

You want to format a date correctly for a locale.

Solution:

Formatting dates and times correctly for a locale can prove challenging, especially considering the variety of possibilities.  Thankfully, Java provides a number of date formatting methods and classes.  icu4j adds even more tools to the programmers toolbox.

To format a date you need to get an instance of the DateFormat class passing the locale in:

//Get a locale object.  In this case we could also use the static constant Locale.FRENCH

Locale french = new Locale("fr");

//Get a DateFormat instance using the locale.  We also specify a length.

//Possible length values are DateFormat.SHORT, DateFormat.MEDIUM, DateFormat.LONG, DateFormat.FULL

//To demonstrate we will get an example of each

int[] lengths = {DateFormat.SHORT, DateFormat.MEDIUM, DateFormat.LONG, DateFormat.FULL};

//Loop through the lengths.  Get a DateFormat instance for each length and format a date

for(int x = 0; x < lengths.length; x++){

    DateFormat df = DateFormat.getDateInstance(lengths[x], french);

    System.out.println(df.format(new Date()));

}

The output:

29/11/08

29 nov. 2008

29 novembre 2008

samedi 29 novembre 2008