The i18n Cookbook - recipies for a global society

 Problem:

You know what parts of a date you want to display but you don't know the exact pattern to use.

Solution:

Often a Java programmer will know what type of pattern he wants, but not exactly what the pattern would be.  With icu4j's DateTimePatternGenerator you can specify a pattern skeleton, and it will return the most appropriate localized match.

To get the best pattern for the skeleton, "MMMddYYYYH" in Japanese:

//Get a Locale object