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 {
// Public Constructors
1.4  public Locale(String language);  
     public Locale(String language, String country);  
     public Locale(String language, String country, String variant);  
// Public Constants
     public static final Locale CANADA;  
     public static final Locale CANADA_FRENCH;  
     public static final Locale CHINA;  
     public static final Locale CHINESE;  
     public static final Locale ENGLISH;  
     public static final Locale FRANCE;  
     public static final Locale FRENCH;  
     public static final Locale GERMAN;  
     public static final Locale GERMANY;  
     public static final Locale ITALIAN;  
     public static final Locale ITALY;  
     public static final Locale JAPAN;  
     public static final Locale JAPANESE;  
     public static final Locale KOREA;  
     public static final Locale KOREAN;  
     public static final Locale PRC;  
     public static final Locale SIMPLIFIED_CHINESE;  
     public static final Locale TAIWAN;  
     public static final Locale TRADITIONAL_CHINESE;  
     public static final Locale UK;  
     public static final Locale US;  
// Public Class Methods
1.2  public static Locale[ ] getAvailableLocales( );  
     public static Locale getDefault( );  
1.2  public static String[ ] getISOCountries( );  
1.2  public static String[ ] getISOLanguages( );  
     public static void setDefault(Locale newLocale);                   synchronized
// Public Instance Methods
     public String getCountry( );  
     public final String getDisplayCountry( );  
     public String getDisplayCountry(Locale inLocale);  
     public final String getDisplayLanguage( );  
     public String getDisplayLanguage(Locale inLocale);  
     public final String getDisplayName( );  
     public String getDisplayName(Locale inLocale);  
     public final String getDisplayVariant( );  
     public String getDisplayVariant(Locale inLocale);  
     public String getISO3Country( ) throws MissingResourceException;  
     public String getISO3Language( ) throws MissingResourceException;  
     public String getLanguage( );  
     public String getVariant( );  
// Public Methods Overriding Object
     public Object clone( );  
     public boolean equals(Object obj);  
     public int hashCode( );  
     public final String toString( );  
}

Passed To

Too many methods to list.

Returned By

java.text.BreakIterator.getAvailableLocales( ), java.text.Collator.getAvailableLocales( ), java.text.DateFormat.getAvailableLocales( ), java.text.MessageFormat.getLocale( ), java.text.NumberFormat.getAvailableLocales( ), Calendar.getAvailableLocales( ), java.util.Formatter.locale( ), ResourceBundle.getLocale( ), Scanner.locale( ), javax.security.auth.callback.LanguageCallback.getLocale( )