Getting date format from Locale

[Oscar Johansson]

Hi Ranchers,

What I have in my DB are country and language in String form for each user.

What I need is whether a "DD/MM/YYYY" string will be better to display date to that user or would it be a "MM/DD/YYYY" string.

A Locale can take country and language as parameters for a constructor. But I looked around at the various formatting classes that use this but didn't find an API that would allow me to make the decision required above.

Is there any way to do this that I missed?

[Thomas Thevis]

Hello Onkar,

I don't know whether I got your question right. If you want to format a date for a given locale you would perform the following steps:

    
final Date currentDate = new Date();
final DateFormat dateInstance
    = DateFormat.getDateInstance(DateFormat.SHORT, Locale.UK);
final String format = dateInstance.format(currentDate);
System.out.println(format);

But this is not your question, right? You want to retrieve the pattern that is used for formatting?
I think, there is a kind of dirty way to retrive the actual pattern. If you have a look at the runtime type of the DateFormat from above, this will usually be a SimpleDateFormat. And the SimpleDateFormat has a method toPattern(). Therefore, you can try to retrieve the pattern as follows:

    
final Date currentDate = new Date();
final DateFormat dateInstance
    = DateFormat.getDateInstance(DateFormat.SHORT, Locale.UK);
final String format = dateInstance.format(currentDate);
System.out.println(format);
 
if (dateInstance instanceof SimpleDateFormat) {
    final String pattern = ((SimpleDateFormat) dateInstance).toPattern();
    System.out.println("pattern: " + pattern);
}

In case your DateFormat instance is not a SimpleDateFormat you could create a fallback solution by defining some kind of dummy date, use the steps of the first code block to retrive a formatted instance and use this one to get the numbering order and separating characters.

Hope this helps,
Thomas

[Oscar Johansson]

Yes it helps!

My thoughts did wander in this direction but was trying to avoid this route since it is, like you mentioned, "kind of dirty". The code made things easier for me.

Thanks!

[Oscar Johansson]

Oh, and yes, you were right. I did want to retrieve the pattern.

[Thomas Thevis]

My thoughts did wander in this direction but was trying to avoid this route since it is, like you mentioned, "kind of dirty". The code made things easier for me.

Thanks!

You're welcome
If you find a solution which is not as dirty, I'd be very interested in knowing about.

Regards,
Thomas