This question already has answers here: SimpleDateFormat and locale based format string (10 answers) Closed 8 years ago.

I need to format da开发者_开发问答te to app that has many languages, what is best way to format date, because every country has different kind of date formatting, so is it possible to format date by locale?

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Yes, using DateFormat.getDateInstance(int style, Locale aLocale) This displays the current date in a locale-specific way.

So, for example:

DateFormat df = DateFormat.getDateInstance(DateFormat.SHORT, yourLocale);
String formattedDate = df.format(yourDate);

See the docs for the exact meaning of the style parameter (SHORT, MEDIUM, etc)

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SimpleDateFormat has a constructor which takes the locale, have you tried that?

http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/text/SimpleDateFormat.html

Something like new SimpleDateFormat("your-pattern-here", Locale.getDefault());

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Joda-Time

Using the Joda-Time 2.4 library. The DateTimeFormat class is a factory of DateTimeFormatter formatters. That class offers a forStyle method to access formatters appropriate to a Locale.

DateTimeFormatter formatter = DateTimeFormat.forStyle( "MM" ).withLocale( Java.util.Locale.CANADA_FRENCH );
String output = formatter.print( DateTime.now( DateTimeZone.forID( "America/Montreal" ) ) );

The argument with two letters specifies a format for the date portion and the time portion. Specify a character of 'S' for short style, 'M' for medium, 'L' for long, and 'F' for full. A date or time may be ommitted by specifying a style character '-' HYPHEN.

Note that we specified both a Locale and a time zone. Some people confuse the two.

• A time zone is an offset from UTC and a set of rules for Daylight Saving Time and other anomalies along with their historical changes.
• A Locale is a human language such as Français, plus a country code such as Canada that represents cultural practices including formatting of date-time strings.

We need all those pieces to properly generate a string representation of a date-time value.

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Take a look at java.text.DateFormat. Easier to use (with a bit less power) is the derived class, java.text.SimpleDateFormat

And here is a good intro to Java internationalization: http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/i18n/index.html (the "Formatting" section addressing your problem, and more).

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I agree with Laura and the SimpleDateFormat which is the best way to manage Dates in java. You can set the pattern and the locale. Plus you can have a look at this wikipedia article about Date in the world -there are not so many different ways to use it; typically USA / China / rest of the world -