The i18n Cookbook - recipies for a global society

Problem:

You want to find the first day of the week for a locale and display it.

Solution:

To get the first day of the week for a calendar in a particular locale you need to first get the Calendar instance by passing in the Locale, then retrieve a DateFormatSymbols object using the same Locale. You can then use the DateFormatSymbols to retrieve an array of weekdays and use the numeric first day of week value returned from the Calendar to get the a human readable first day of week.

To get a human readable first day of week for Great Britain.

Locale locale = new Locale("en","GB");

Calendar calendar = Calendar.getInstance(locale);

DateFormatSymbols dfs = new DateFormatSymbols(locale); System.out.println(dfs.getWeekdays()[calendar.getFirstDayOfWeek()]);

To do the same for Japan using the static Locale shortcut:

Calendar calendar = Calendar.getInstance(Locale.JAPANESE);

DateFormatSymbols dfs = new DateFormatSymbols(Locale.JAPANESE);

System.out.println(dfs.getWeekdays()[calendar.getFirstDayOfWeek()]);