The i18n Cookbook - recipies for a global society

 Problem:

You want to retrieve all of the day of the week names for a locale.

Solution:

The DateFormatSymbols class contains a wealth of information useful to the localization programmer.  You can easily retrieve day names, month names, era names, etc...

To get the days of the week in Korean and English:

//Get a DateFormatSymbols object using a locale as an argument

DateFormatSymbols dfsKorean = new DateFormatSymbols(Locale.KOREAN);

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.