Trouble formatting a Date based on the User's Locale

[James McKee]

I'm having trouble figuring out an easy way to format a date based on the current user's locale without manually passing in a format string. I realize you can do something like this:

DateFormat dateFormat = DateFormat.getDateInstance( DateFormat.SHORT, locale );

However, this does not get me what I want because DateFormat.SHORT is basically M/d/yy. For the default English_US Locale, I want my dates to look like MM/dd/yyyy. As you can see by the code below, I created a little hack to get this, but I feel like there's got to be a better and cleaner way to do this...right? Also, another issue I'm running into is that when I'm logged in as a users' locale which uses '-' instead of '/' (i.e. 21-01-2009), I get a parse exception, thrown by the parseDate method below. Can anyone provide any input? Thanks.

 
   /**
    * Parse a Date
    * 
    * @param dateString
    * @param locale
    * @return parsed Date
    */
   public static Object parseDate( String dateString, Locale locale ) {

      DateFormat dateFormat = DateFormat.getDateInstance( DateFormat.SHORT, locale );
      try {
         return dateFormat.parse( dateString );
      }
      catch( Exception exception ) {
         throw new ExceptionUtl( UtlMessageHelper.getMessage( UtlMessageConstants.ERROR_FailedParseDateFromString, dateString ), exception );
      }
   }

   /**
    * Format the given value into a DateFormat
    * 
    * @param dateObject
    *           Object value to be formatted
    * @param locale
    *           Locale format to use
    * @return dateObject in SimpleDateFormat
    */
   public static String formatDate( Object dateObject, Locale locale ) {

      DateFormat dateFormat = DateFormat.getDateInstance( DateFormat.SHORT, locale );
      if( dateFormat instanceof SimpleDateFormat ) {
         SimpleDateFormat simpleDateFormat = ( SimpleDateFormat )dateFormat;
         String pattern = simpleDateFormat.toPattern();
         if( !pattern.contains( "yyyy" ) ) {
            pattern = pattern.replace( "yy", "yyyy" );
         }
         if( !pattern.contains( "dd" ) ) {
            pattern = pattern.replace( "d", "dd" );
         }
         if( !pattern.contains( "MM" ) ) {
            pattern = pattern.replace( "M", "MM" );
         }
         simpleDateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat( pattern );
         return simpleDateFormat.format( dateObject );
      }
      return null;
   }

[Wei Geng]

Maybe you can try java.text.SimpleDateFormat class.

This class allows us to format the Date into a certain pattern (i.e. yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss) and also can parse the a String to Date with a pattern.

Please read the Java SE API. It will be helpful.

[James McKee]

Wei GENG wrote:Maybe you can try java.text.SimpleDateFormat class.

This class allows us to format the Date into a certain pattern (i.e. yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss) and also can parse the a String to Date with a pattern.

Please read the Java SE API. It will be helpful.

I'm aware of that class, but I don't want to pass in a specific string to the SimpleDateFormat class. I want to know if there's a way JAVA can figure out the formatting for me, based on the user's locale.

[James McKee]

any help would be appreciated

[Martijn Verburg]

You'll have to use SimpleDateFormat I'm afraid, unless the default Java format for a locale matches what you expect (which in your example it didn't.)