Java Glossary : locale

Java definitions: 0-9 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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a geographic or political region that shares the same language and customs. Programs can be customised to a language, country and style. Locales have been given standard identifiers, e.g. Locale.CANADA_FRENCH, Locale.FRANCE, CANADA_US. These are not the same as country codes. There are three main ways to get a java.util.Locale:

Locale currentLocale = Locale.getDefault(); // browser/JVM default
Locale currentLocale = new Locale( "en" , "US" ); // language/country
Locale currentLocale = Locale.CANADA_FRENCH; // static final constants

java.text.NumberFormat uses the current locale by default. You can create a locale specific formatter with:

NumberFormat nf = NumberFormat.getNumberInstance(someLocale);

You can use that NumberFormat both for input (parsing) and output (formatting):

// locale-sensitive parse
double doubleResult = 0.;
long longResult = 0;
java.lang.Number n = nf.parse ( "-2,123.45" );
if (n instanceof Long) longResult = ( (Long)n).longValue ();
else if (n instanceof Double) doubleResult = ((Double )n).doubleValue ();

// locale sensitive format
String display = nf.format(88899L);

java.text.DecimalFormatSymbols lets you get and set the individual characters such as getDecimalSeparator() and getGroupingSeparator(). You can translate Strings, Audioclips and Images used by your programs and pack them into java.util.ResourceBundles. IBM has some sample code.

country codes ¤ Sun's Localisation Tutorial

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