Lesson: Setting the Locale
An internationalized program can display information differently
throughout the world. For example, the program will display different
messages in Paris, Tokyo, and New York. If the localization process has
been fine-tuned, the program will display different messages in New
York and London to account for the differences between American and
British English. How does an internationalized program identify the
appropriate language and region of its end users? Easy. It references a
Locale object.
A Locale object is an identifier for a particular
combination of language and region. If a class varies its behavior
according to Locale, it is said to be
locale-sensitive. For example, the NumberFormat
class is locale-sensitive; the format of the number it returns depends
on the Locale. Thus NumberFormat may return a
number as 902 300 (France), or 902.300 (Germany), or 902,300 (United
States). Locale objects are only identifiers. The real
work, such as formatting and detecting word boundaries, is performed by
the methods of the locale-sensitive classes.
The following sections explain how to work with Locale objects:
When creating a Locale object, you usually specify a
language code and a country code. A third parameter, the variant, is
optional.
Locale-sensitive classes support only certain Locale
definitions. This section shows you how to determine which Locale definitions are supported.
On the Java platform you do not specify a global
Locale by setting an environment variable before running
the application. Instead you either rely on the default Locale or
assign a Locale to each locale-sensitive object.
This section explains how to enable plug-in of locale-dependent data and services.
These SPIs provides support of more locales in addition to the currently available locales.
