A Word About Locales
A locale represents a geographic,
political, or cultural region. In Java, locales are represented by the
java.util.Locale
class. A locale is
frequently defined by a language, which is represented by its standard
lowercase two-letter code, such as en (English) or fr (French).
Sometimes, however, language alone is not sufficient to uniquely
specify a locale, and a country is added to the specification. A
country is represented by an uppercase two-letter code. For example,
the United States English locale (en_US) is distinct from the British
English locale (en_GB), and the French spoken in Canada (fr_CA) is
different from the French spoken in France (fr_FR). Occasionally, the
scope of a locale is further narrowed with the addition of a
system-dependent variant string.
The Locale
class maintains a
static default locale, which can be set and queried with Locale.setDefault( )
and Locale.getDefault( )
. Locale-sensitive
methods in Java typically come in two forms. One uses the default
locale, and the other uses a Locale
object that is explicitly specified as an argument. A program can
create and use any number of nondefault Locale
objects, although it is more common
simply to rely on the default locale, which is inherited from the
underlying default locale on the native platform. Locale-sensitive
classes in Java often provide a method to query the list of locales
that they support.
Finally, note that AWT and Swing GUI components (see Chapter 11) have a locale property, ...
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