The Java Tutorials have been written for JDK 8. Examples and practices described in this page don't take advantage of improvements introduced in later releases and might use technology no longer available.
See Java Language Changes for a summary of updated language features in Java SE 9 and subsequent releases.
See JDK Release Notes for information about new features, enhancements, and removed or deprecated options for all JDK releases.
You can create a Locale
with any combination of valid language and country codes, but that doesn't mean that you can use it. Remember, a Locale
object is only an identifier. You pass the Locale
object to other objects, which then do the real work. These other objects, which we call locale-sensitive, do not know how to deal with all possible Locale
definitions.
To find out which types of Locale
definitions a locale-sensitive class recognizes, you invoke the getAvailableLocales
method. For example, to find out which Locale
definitions are supported by the DateFormat
class, you could write a routine such as the following:
import java.util.*; import java.text.*; public class Available { static public void main(String[] args) { Locale list[] = DateFormat.getAvailableLocales(); for (Locale aLocale : list) { System.out.println(aLocale.toString()); } } }
Note that the String
returned by toString
contains the language and country codes, separated by an underscore:
ar_EG be_BY bg_BG ca_ES cs_CZ da_DK de_DE ...
If you want to display a list of Locale
names to end users, you should show them something easier to understand than the language and country codes returned by toString
. Instead you can invoke the Locale.getDisplayName
method, which retrieves a localized String
of a Locale
object. For example, when toString
is replaced by getDisplayName
in the preceding code, the program prints the following lines:
Arabic (Egypt) Belarussian (Belarus) Bulgarian (Bulgaria) Catalan (Spain) Czech (Czech Republic) Danish (Denmark) German (Germany) ...
You may see different locale lists depending on the Java Platform implementations.