Locales and Cultures

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	Locales and Cultures
	Next: Internationalization

A culture consists of a language in lower case and a country in upper case.

A locale consists of the culture code plus a variant code.

To separate these two, Microsoft/ASP uses dashes and Java/UNIX uses underlines.

ASP.NET

MS ASP.NET Internationalization

Articles on Internationalization of ASP pages

Microsoft's Global Development and Computing Portal

ASP.NET accesses locales through its CultureInfo class, which tracks two properties: CurrentCulture for the default of locale-dependent functions and CurrentUICulture for locale-specific lookup of resource data. These can be specified for each thread and request:

<%@Import Namespace="System.Globalization"%>
...
<%=DateTime.Now.ToString("f", new System.Globalization.CultureInfo("de-DE"))%>

Java Internationalization

Internally, most Java packages make use of the 1.4.2/ 1.5 java.util.Locale package that encapsulate locale information in Locale objects. To instantiate a Locale object with the default Locale obtained from the operating system:

import java.util.Locale.*;
...
private Locale locale = new java.util.Locale.getDefault();

Internally, the Locale id for English in the United States is “en_US”.

To set the default locale, the country and variant are optional but the language is required:

java.util.Locale.setDefault( localevar );

Next: Internationalization

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