Question

I have a multilingual ASP.NET site; one of the languages is Arabic (ar-SA). To switch between cultures, I use this code:

Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture(Name) Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = New CultureInfo(Name) 

When displaying the date of an article, for example, I just do this, and the localization API takes care of everything:

<%#Eval('DatelineDate','{0:d MMMM yyyy}')%> 

The problem is that this displays dates using the Hijiri (Islamic) calendar (e.g. the year 2008 is rendered as 1429). The client wants to display the dates using the Gregorian calendar (still rendering the month names and everything else in Arabic, of course). How can I do this?

Answer 1

Answer:

Turns out the ar-SA culture is the only one to use the Hijiri calendar; all the other Arabic cultures use Gregorian. Here are the different date formats in Arabic (a bit messed up because WMD doesn’t support seem to support RTL text).

ar-AE 11 ديسمبر 2008  ar-BH 11 ديسمبر 2008  ar-DZ 11 ديسمبر 2008  ar-EG 11 ديسمبر 2008  ar-IQ 11 كانون الأول 2008  ar-JO 11 كانون الأول 2008  ar-KW 11 ديسمبر 2008  ar-LB 11 كانون الأول 2008  ar-LY 11 ديسمبر 2008  ar-MA 11 دجنبر 2008  ar-OM 11 ديسمبر 2008  ar-QA 11 ديسمبر 2008  ar-SA 13 ذو الحجة 1429  ar-SY 11 كانون الأول 2008  ar-TN 11 ديسمبر 2008  ar-YE 11 ديسمبر 2008  

And for what it’s worth here’s the quick & dirty code I used to generate this list:

    Response.Write("<table width=300px>")     For Each ci As CultureInfo In (From c As CultureInfo In CultureInfo.GetCultures(CultureTypes.AllCultures) Order By c.Name Where c.Name.StartsWith("ar-"))         Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = CultureInfo.GetCultureInfo(ci.Name)         Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = New CultureInfo(ci.Name)         Response.Write(String.Format("<tr><td>{0}</td> <td style='direction:rtl;font-size:20px;'>{1:d MMMM yyyy}</td></tr>", ci.Name, Today))      Next     Response.Write("</table>")     Response.End() 

More cultures at http://www.massimilianobianchi.info/max/articles/22/UI-culture-list-and-codes.aspx