Experiment: DateTime formats

This article explains how to loop through all supported cultures on any given machine that's able to run .NET. The code sample is in C# and outputs an HTML table you can copy - but obviously you can adapt it to your needs! This was something I needed to support some weird documentation task way back when - and it took me like a year to finish this blog post and push it out from the drafts...

Background

Okay. So I needed to figure out what locales certain machines support, and what kind of DateTime formats those would produce. Being the crafty coder I am, I set out to copy-paste some readymade code from docs.microsoft.com.

As a side note, after Microsoft opened the docs out to community contributions, I have had far less need to browse StackOverflow for my carefully curated code snippets of questionable quality. I'm going to regard that as a minor victory on the path to friendlier developer communities. Because we all know how friendly Stack Overflow is... :)

Anyway - Microsoft has a sample for looping through available cultures. But we all know how awfully difficult it is to copy-paste a table from Excel to WordPress, so I didn't want to export the locales to a CSV or anything.

Long story short, instead I just changed the example app by Microsoft for listing the installed cultures (see links in References!) to instead output an HTML table of all installed cultures with date/time format samples.

Sample code

The code I used is shown below - it is repurposed to display all installed cultures, but only a few properties for each, as I really had no use for "3-letter ISO format", for example. But in case you need it, just uncomment the appropriate lines!

As a side note, I used "CultureTypes.NeutralCultures" which outputs all cultures associated with a language, but not necessarily a country, and also skips all user-defined custom cultures. If you want to have every single culture your machine is aware of, replace NeutralCultures with AllCultures.

using System;
using System.Globalization;

public class CultureInfoEnumeration
{
    public static void Main()
    {
        var sampleDate = new DateTime(2021, 12, 31, 13, 05, 40);

        // Displays properties &
        // an example date time for all installed cultures
        Console.Write("<table><tr>");
        Console.Write("<th>CULTURE</th>");
        Console.Write("<th>ISO (2-letter)</th>");
        //Console.Write("<th>ISO (3-letter)</th>");
        //Console.Write("<th>WIN</th>");
        Console.Write("<th>Display name</th>");
        //Console.Write("<th>English name</th>");
        Console.Write("<th>Date/time format sample</th>");
        Console.WriteLine("</tr>");

        foreach (CultureInfo ci in CultureInfo.GetCultures(CultureTypes.NeutralCultures))
        {
            Console.Write($"<tr><td>{ci.Name}</td>");
            Console.Write($"<td>{ci.TwoLetterISOLanguageName}</td>");
            //Console.Write($"<td>{ci.ThreeLetterISOLanguageName}</td>");
            //Console.Write($"<td>{ci.ThreeLetterWindowsLanguageName}</td>");
            Console.Write($"<td>{ci.DisplayName}</td>");
            //Console.Write($"<td>{ci.EnglishName}</td>");
            Console.Write($"<td>{sampleDate.ToString(ci.DateTimeFormat)}</td>");
            Console.WriteLine("</tr>");
        }
        Console.WriteLine("</table>");

        Console.ReadKey();
    }
}

See the full solution here: https://github.com/koskila/CodeSamples/blob/main/CultureInfoEnumeration/Program.cs

Results

Okay, so this is going to be a long one. My WordPress editor is crumbling under the heaviness of the HTML. Which would be funny, if it wasn't quite sad.

That's it. That's a long-ish list of locales and their associated date/time formats. Hope it helps someone else, too :)

References

• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.globalization.cultureinfo.getcultures?view=net-5.0