C# format date times for different locals (localization and globalization), DateTimeFormatInfo

-
Working on a project recently I found we were presenting date/time data to a variety of users in various countries. Each country uses it's own date/time formatting. Here in the US it's often MM/dd/yyyy, however in Europe it's often dd/MM/yyyy and in Asia they don't even have the slashes they use special characters that designate year, month, and day. At first we were going to come up with localized versions of all the possible date/time combinations you can display (June 6th, 1977, 6/25/77, etc) but Microsoft has an even better solution already in place.

static void Main( string[] args )
{
         DateTime dt = DateTime.Now;

         // let's create some different date times for different cultures

         // JAPANESE
         CultureInfo culture = new CultureInfo("ja-JP");
         DateTimeFormatInfo formatInfo = culture.DateTimeFormat;
         String time = dt.ToString( formatInfo.FullDateTimePattern, culture );
         MessageBox.Show( time );

         // ENGLISH
         culture = new CultureInfo( "en-US" );
         formatInfo = culture.DateTimeFormat;
         time = dt.ToString( formatInfo.FullDateTimePattern, culture );
         MessageBox.Show( time );

         // SIMPLIFIED CHINESE
         culture = new CultureInfo( "zh-CN" );
         formatInfo = culture.DateTimeFormat;
         time = dt.ToString( formatInfo.FullDateTimePattern, culture );
         MessageBox.Show( time );

         // FRENCH
         culture = new CultureInfo( "fr-FR" );
         formatInfo = culture.DateTimeFormat;
         time = dt.ToString( formatInfo.FullDateTimePattern, culture );
         MessageBox.Show( time );

         Console.ReadKey();

}

Looking at the code, we take the current date time and use the format string from the DateTimeFormatInfo to convert the current date time into the date time of the specified culture. In this example I'm using the FullDateTimePattern, but the DateTimeFormatInfo class has a many different formats you can use.

You can read about all the different formats at MSDN.


I hope this example helps you easily get date/times formatted into the various cultures. I know I've found it quite useful.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Yes but they are displaying the same time in different languages. Whereas it should display the actual time in different countries how would you tackle that

Saurabh
(myemail.co.in)
Wednesday, August 29, 2012 1:53:00 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

String.Replace vs Regex.Replace

-
Image
I recently ran into a situation where I had to do some string manipulation. I had to replace some bad text with valid text. All this had to do with creating valid xml element names. So we had to string white space and some other invalid characters and replace them with valid xml element formatting. To do this we ended up using the Regex.Replace static method. Simply because there was some complexity involved that would have entailed using more then 1 String.Replace call when we can do it all with one regular expression. This caused some discussion about how heavy the regex class is and when to use it. I decided to do some testing and these are my results. First the code static void Main( string[] args ) { // this is our test value string testValue = "This is a test string"; int count; // run the regex replace DateTime regexStart = DateTime.Now; for( count = 0; count < 10000000; count++ ) { string newValue = Regex.Replace( testValue, &qu
Read more

C# Form Application in Kiosk Mode/Fullscreen

-
Sometimes you need to have a C# windows form application run in full screen mode.  Like you see on a kiosk at a mall or some stand alone machine.  It's fairly easy you just need to set some of the properties on the Form either in it's OnLoad method or directly in the designer. In the OnLoad method of the main Form set these values, or again set them directly in the designer. this.MaximizeBox = false; this.TopMost = true; this.FormBorderStyle = System.Windows.Forms.FormBorderStyle.None; this.WindowState = System.Windows.Forms.FormWindowState.Maximized;
Read more

Javascript numeric only text box

-
So working on an asp.net page I found I needed a numeric only text box that allowed numbers from 0-100 with no decimals. I found a range validator would do most of the work but I wanted to keep users from typing in bad values. So after some searching I found javascript has a good solution. I like whitespace so shrink if you're one of those white space freaks. Update: someone was kind enough to point out an error in my JS! So I went through and made sure it works. And it did need a minor tweak to be correct. So thanks to the poster the corrected script and usage are below. Update Again: This is the new and improved function to allow for the tab key to tab out of the text box. IE allows this by default however Firefox really tightens down the text box and doesn't allow anything you don't specify. So I had to add the tab key press. I also cleaned up the code so it isn't a huge chunk of if blocks and is now much more succinct. Please feel free to test and us
Read more