Couldn't translate Date to spanish with Locale("es_ES")

Question

I'm trying to do a simple date format, it does work great, it's very easy, but the problem is the language. I used the locale "es_ES" to get "Miércoles" instead of "Wednesday" and sorts like that but i failed.

Here's my code:

SimpleDateFormat formato =      new SimpleDateFormat("EEEE d 'de' MMMM 'de' yyyy", new Locale("es_ES")); String fecha = formato.format(new Date()); 

The EXPECTED value of the fecha string is:

Miércoles 4 de Abril de 2012

but i'm still getting:

Wednesday 4 de April de 2012

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

"es_ES" is a language + country. You must specify each part separately.

The constructors for Locale are:

• Locale(String language)
  Construct a locale from a language code.
• Locale(String language, String country)
  Construct a locale from language, country.
• Locale(String language, String country, String variant)
  Construct a locale from language, country, variant.

You want new Locale("es", "ES"); to get the Locale that goes with es_ES.

However, it would be better to use Locale.forLanguageTag("es-ES"), using the well-formed IETF BCP 47 language tag es-ES (with - instead of _), since that method can return a cached Locale, instead of always creating a new one.

Answer 2

tl;dr

String output =      ZonedDateTime.now ( ZoneId.of ( "Europe/Madrid" ) )     .format (          DateTimeFormatter.ofLocalizedDate ( FormatStyle.FULL )                          .withLocale ( new Locale ( "es" , "ES" ) )      ) ; 

martes 12 de julio de 2016

Details

The accepted Answer by Affe is correct. You were incorrectly constructing a Locale object.

java.time

The Question and Answer both use old outmoded classes now supplanted by the java.time framework built into Java 8 and later. These classes supplant the old troublesome date-time classes such as java.util.Date. See Oracle Tutorial. Much of the java.time functionality is back-ported to Java 6 & 7 in ThreeTen-Backport and further adapted to Android in ThreeTenABP.

These classes include the DateTimeFormatter to control the format of text when generating a String from your date-time value. You can specify an explicit formatting pattern. But why bother? Let the class automatically localize the format to the human language and cultural norms of a specific Locale.

For example, get the current moment in Madrid regional time zone.

ZoneId zoneId = ZoneId.of( "Europe/Madrid" ); ZonedDateTime zdt = ZonedDateTime.now( zoneId ); // example: 2016-07-12T01:43:09.231+02:00[Europe/Madrid]  

Instantiate a formatter to generate a String to represent that date-time value. Specify the length of the text via FormatStyle (full, long, medium, short).

DateTimeFormatter formatter = DateTimeFormatter.ofLocalizedDate ( FormatStyle.FULL ); 

Apply a Locale to substitute for the JVM’s current default Locale assigned to the formatter.

Locale locale = new Locale ( "es" , "ES" ); formatter = formatter.withLocale ( locale ); 

Use the formatter to generate a String object.

String output = zdt.format ( formatter ); // example: martes 12 de julio de 2016 

Dump to console.

System.out.println ( "zdt: " + zdt + " with locale: " + locale + " | output: " + output ); 

zdt: 2016-07-12T01:43:09.231+02:00[Europe/Madrid] with locale: es_ES | output: martes 12 de julio de 2016