Getting OS language in java

Question

I'm running into a kind of problem here.

I'm French and working on an English version of Windows XP. Therefore, I set the regional options to French, but still have an English language UI.

I'm working on a small Java SE application, and decided to internationalize it using resources bundle.

To display the proper language, I create the bundle with this function :

private static ResourceBundle bundle = ResourceBundle
          .getBundle("locale.Strings", Locale.getDefault());

But the Locale.getDefault() function returns the regional settings (meaning : French) and not the system UI language. As a result, my UI defaults to French, in an English environment. And well, that's not really what I expected...

Does anyone knows of a platform-independent way to recover the system UI language ? Thanks in advance !

Edit : fixed Local to Locale, thanks.

Answer 1

This is a misconfiguration in Windows. The Locale#getDefault() returns the system locale, not the date/time formatting region or location.

In the below Windows XP specific screenshot, you could just set the Regional Options and Language to French or whatever you like. The dropdown in the Advanced menu actually sets the system locale and should in your case be set to English.

Admittedly, this is in Windows XP poorly explained, Windows 7 does it somewhat better:

Answer 2

I have no means to try it out (as I tend to avoid anything made by Microsoft), but take a look at these:

Java 7 required:

Locale uiLocale = Locale.getDefault(Locale.Category.DISPLAY);

That's what should be used for getting translations (starting from Java 7), anyway.

If this was not very helpful, I'd try:

System.out.println(System.getenv("LC_MESSAGES"));       
System.out.println(System.getenv("LANG"));
System.out.println(System.getenv("LANGUAGE"));

However, in this case I would expect some similarities to default Locale...