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.

Checking for default locale

a_culture_info : CULTURE_INFO
a_culture_info.current_culture.name : SYSTEM_STRING
    -- returns the name of the current culture info, (in the format described below).

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 here
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

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 here)

• 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 here)

Other information

References

• ms-help://MS.NETFramework.v20.en/cpref8/html/T_System_Globalization_CultureInfo.htm (ms-help is the .NET documentation)
• http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.globalization.cultureinfo.aspx
• http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.globalization.compareinfo.aspx