Question

I am working on internationalizing a project that has a custom date picker. The en-US version displays a message like to the user “Invalid date, valid format is mm/dd/yyyy.” The “Invalid date, valid format is mm/dd/yyyy” is a resource string. The allows for the date format to be customized from the culture default so simply translating the ‘mm/dd/yyyy’ part is not an option. I know how to get the date format from the current culture (in .net) but I was wondering if there a way translate the m’s, d’s, and y’s or what the generally accepted practice for this type of problem is?

Answer 1

You would need to externalize it that is move it to resource file. There is no practice as such, but what I could recommend is to actually generate the entry from DateTimeFormatInfo (there is a format switch “g” that gives you so-called general, that is default date & time format). Adding appropriate comment won’t hurt either.