Experiment: DateTime formats

This post was most recently updated on December 13th, 2021.

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

• Author
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Antti K. Koskela

Developer / Speaker / Consultant at Koskila / Precio Fishbone / Norppandalotti Software Co / Alter - Experience Ideas Ltd

Antti Koskela is a proud digital native nomadic millennial full stack developer (is that enough funny buzzwords? That's definitely enough funny buzzwords!), who works as Solutions Architect for Precio Fishbone, building delightful Digital Workplaces.

He's been a developer from 2004 (starting with PHP and Java), and he's been working on .NET projects, Azure, Office 365, SharePoint and a lot of other stuff. He's also Microsoft MVP for Azure.

This is his personal professional (e.g. professional, but definitely personal) blog.

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