Internationalization/dotnet locale

Summary

There is a class named CULTURE_INFO in "mscorlib" in EiffelStudio, which provides information about a specific culture such as:

• associated language
• sublanguage
• country/region
• calendar
• cultural conventions

Listing available locales

I didn't find a function that returns all the available locale informations, I think because under .NET, they are all avaiable.

Retrieving locale information

To obtain informations on a specific locale, it suffices to create an instance of CULTURE_INFO. There are basically two ways to do this:

1. Create it with the culture identifier. This identifier maps every culture/language to an integer. It is not very usefull, because I did not find a logic behind the mapping function... You can find a table on [1]
2. Create it with the name (STRING) of the culture. The culture names follow the RFC 1766 standard in the format "<languagecode2>-<country/regioncode2>", where <languagecode2> is a lowercase two-letter code derived from ISO 639-1 and <country/regioncode2> is an uppercase two-letter code derived from ISO 3166.

You can find a detailed description of RFC 1766 on [2]

The CULTURE_INFO Class has some attibutes useful for the retrieving of the informations about Date, Time and Number formatting, they are:

• date_time_format: DATE_TIME_FORMAT_INFO (see: [3])

Some information that is available in DATE_TIME_FORMAT_INFO

Information	Result for locale "it-CH"
full_date_time_pattern	dddd, d. MMMM yyyy HH:mm:ss
long_date_pattern	dddd, d. MMMM yyyy
long_time_pattern	HH:mm:ss
month_day_pattern	d. MMMM
rfc1123_pattern	ddd, dd MMM yyyy HH':'mm':'ss 'GMT'
pm_designator
short_date_pattern	dd.MM.yyyy
short_time_pattern	HH:mm
sortable_date_time_pattern	yyyy'-'MM'-'dd'T'HH':'mm':'ss
time_separator

• there are also functions that return abbreviations of names of months and day:
  • get_abbreviated_day_name (dayofweek: DAY_OF_WEEK) : SYSTEM_STRING
  • get_abbreviated_month_name (month: INTEGER) : SYSTEM_STRING

• number_format: NUMBER_FORMAT_INFO (see: [4])

Some information that is available in NUMBER_FORMAT_INFO

Information	Result for locale "it-CH"
currency_group_separator	'
currency_symbol	SFr.
currency_decimal_digits	2
negative_sign	-
number_decimal_digits	2
number_decimal_separator	.
number_group_separator	'
positive_sign	+
negative_sign	-
negative_infinity_symbol	-Infinito
per_mille_symbol	ë
na_n_symbol	Non un numero reale

Other information

Links

[1] http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms172470.aspx

[2] http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1766.html

[3] http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.globalization.datetimeformatinfo.aspx

[4] http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.globalization.numberformatinfo.aspx

References

ms-help://MS.NETFramework.v20.en/cpref8/html/T_System_Globalization_CultureInfo.htm (*)

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.globalization.cultureinfo.aspx

see: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.globalization.compareinfo.aspx

(*) : ms-help is the .NET documentation