django country from request

Question

I'm building a Django (1.6) site (with twitter bootstrap) which has some forms where the user has to fill in some dates. I enabled l10n and i18n. The datetime fields are controlled by a JQuery widget. The widget accept a parameter to define the input format of the date and time. How can I get the current django datetime format in a template tag, so that I can map this to it's Javascript equivalent? What I want is to get the complete locale (like nl_BE, en_US,...) because I live in Belgium and we spreak French, Dutch and German, but we all use the same date format. If I use the language only (with get_language from django.utils.translation), I see the date formats from France and Germany.

>>> from django.utils import formats
>>> formats.get_format("SHORT_DATE_FORMAT", lang="nl")
Out[27]: u'j-n-Y'
>>> formats.get_format("SHORT_DATE_FORMAT", lang="fr")
Out[28]: u'j N Y'
>>> formats.get_format("SHORT_DATE_FORMAT", lang="de")
Out[29]: u'd.m.Y'

I checked already Django-datetime-widget on their demo page, but if I switch my browser (chrome) to dutch or french, it does not change the date format...

Anyone has an idea for to solve this?

Answer 1

It sounds like you need to create some custom format files, because django does not provide locale formats for fr_BE, de_BE, and nl_BE. See https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.6/topics/i18n/formatting/#creating-custom-format-files on how to create custom locale formats.

It basically involves creating a new app that will contain your new formats, and specifying that app using the FORMAT_MODULE_PATH setting.

Your formats app should be something like:

formats/
    __init__.py
    fr_BE/
        __init__.py
        formats.py
    nl_BE/
        __init__.py
        formats.py
    de_BE/
        __init__.py
        formats.py

You should also add fr-be, de-be, and nl-be to your LANGUAGES in settings.py

LANGUAGES = (
    ('nl-be', ugettext_lazy('Dutch (Belgium)')),
    ('nl-fr', ugettext_lazy('French (Belgium)')),
    ('nl-de', ugettext_lazy('German (Belgium)')),
)