Java in a Nutshell, 5th Edition

Name

Locale

Synopsis

The Locale class represents a locale: a political, geographical, or cultural region that typically has a distinct language and distinct customs and conventions for such things as formatting dates, times, and numbers. The Locale class defines a number of constants that represent commonly used locales. Locale also defines a static getDefault( ) method that returns the default Locale object, which represents a locale value inherited from the host system. getAvailableLocales( ) returns the list of all locales supported by the underlying system. If none of these methods for obtaining a Locale object are suitable, you can explicitly create your own Locale object. To do this, you must specify a language code and optionally a country code and variant string. getISOCountries( ) and getISOLanguages( ) return the list of supported country codes and language codes.

The Locale class does not implement any internationalization behavior itself; it merely serves as a locale identifier for those classes that can localize their behavior. Given a Locale object, you can invoke the various getDisplay methods to obtain a description of the locale suitable for display to a user. These methods may themselves take a Locale argument, so the names of languages and countries can be localized as appropriate.

Figure 16-42. java.util.Locale

public final class Locale implements Cloneable, Serializable ...