#1,118 – An Example of Input that Obeys CurrentCulture

One step in internationalizing an application is to respect the current regional settings when reading numeric or date/time values from a user.

If you are parsing user-entered text and converting to numeric or date/time data, the Parse methods associated with individual data types respect the current regional settings.

Below, we read text from two TextBox controls, interpreting the first value as a double and the second as a DateTime using the corresponding Parse method.

        private void Button_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
        {
            try
            {
                double num = double.Parse(txt1.Text);
                DateTime dt = DateTime.Parse(txt2.Text);
            }
            catch (Exception xx)
            {
                MessageBox.Show(xx.ToString());
            }
        }

On an English/US system, we can enter the data as “1.1” and “5/2/12”.  The date is interpreted as May 2nd.

For French/France, we must enter “1,1” for the double.  “5/2/12” is interpreted as Feb 5th.

#1,117 – Internationalization II – Obey CurrentCulture for Input

The first step in internationalizing an application is to ensure that your application honors the user’s current regional settings, as reflected by the CurrentCulture property of the application’s main thread.

Current culture impacts not only how you display the following types of data, but also how the user inputs this data:

• Numeric data
• Date/time values

These values are typically stored internally as numeric (e.g. double, int) or DateTime values.  The values exist in memory in a culture-agnostic form.  You need to worry about regional settings only when you display a value to the user or receive input from the user.

In .NET, if you use the Parse method of a numeric or date/time type to convert a user-supplied string to the internal type, the parse operation will expect the string to be in a format that is valid for the current region.