Let's say I have a date that I can represent in a culture-invariant format (ISO 8601).
I'll pick July 6, 2009, 3:54 pm UTC time in Paris, a.k.a. 5:54 pm local time in Paris observing daylight savings.
2009-07-06T15:54:12.000+02:00
OK... is there any hidden gem of markup that will tell the browser to convert that string into a localized version of it?
The closest solution is using Javascript's Date.prototype.toLocaleString(). It certainly does a good job, but it can be slow to iterate over a lot of dates, and it relies on Javascript.
Is there any HTML, CSS, XSLT, or otherwise semantic markup that a browser will recognize and automatically render the correct localized string?
Edit:
The method I am currently using is replacing the text of an HTML element with a localized string:
Starting with:
<span class="date">2009/07/06 15:54:12 GMT</span>
Using Javascript (with jQuery):
var dates = $("span.date", context);
// use for loop instead of .each() for speed
for(var i=0,len=dates.length; i < len; i++) {
// parse the date
var d = new Date(dates.eq(i).text());
// set the text to the localized string
dates.eq(i).text(d.toLocaleString());
}
From a practical point of view, it makes the text "flash" to the new value when the Javascript runs, and I don't like it.
From a principles point of view, I don't get why we need to do this - the browser should be able to localize standard things like currency, dates, numbers, as long as we mark it up as such.
A follow up question: Why do browsers/the Web not have such a simple feature - take a standard data item, and format it according to the client's settings?
I use toLocaleString() on my site, and I've never had a problem with the speed of it. How are you getting the server date into the Date object? Parsing?
I add a comment node right before I display the date as the server sees it. Inside the comment node is the date/time of that post as the number of milliseconds since epoch. In Rails, for example:
<!--<%= post.created_at.to_i * 1000 %>-->
If they have JS enabled, I use jQuery to grab those nodes, get the value of the comment, then:
var date = new Date();
date.setTime(msFromEpoch);
// output date.toLocaleString()
If they don't have JS enabled, they can feel free to do the conversion in their head.
If you're trying to parse the ISO time, that may be the cause of your slowness. Also, how many dates are we talking?
Unfortunately, there is not.
HTML & CSS are strictly used for presentation, as such, there is no "smarts" built in to change the way things are displayed.
Your best bet would be to use a server side language (like .NET, Python, etc.) to emit the dates into the HTML in the format you want them shown to your user.
It is not possible to do this with HTML, it has no smart tags that can make any kind of decisions like this. It is strictly presentational. I do wonder, though, if HTML5 perhaps has a tag for something like this...
Anyways, the way I see it, you have 3 options:
Stick to the Javascript way. There's questions with more details on it on this website, such as How do I display a date/time in the user’s locale format and time offset? and How can I determine a web user’s time zone?
Try to use geolocation. That is, your server side script fires off a request to one of the many geolocator services out there on the user's first page visit to try and guess where the user is. The downside of this is that it will be wrong about 10% of the time, so it's not that much better than the market share Javascript is going to get you.... (all in all, then, not a very good method...)
Ask the user! You will see that most websites that want to display a tailored experience for you will ask you this sort of thing because it's just not possible to know. As a neat fallback, you could wrap the question around <noscript> tags so you only ask those with Javascript disabled while offering the Javascript experience to those that have it.
Dojo has some pretty good localizations for dates and currencies. Using this method also allows you to pick different formats (e.g.: short date vs long date) and force locales.
The language and the user's locale should be sent on the HTTP header. You can use those to create the correct date format server-side to be displayed to the user. However, this is often undesirable because many users completely ignore their locale settings in their OS and/or browser. So, you may be feeding USA style timestamps to New Zealanders.
I liked the trick posted in the comment above, but it sounds like a QA headache, since you could be dealing with a large number of clients that implement timestamps in very different ways.
The most effective solution I have seen, is to simple provide a panel to allow your users to choose what time format they like. Some users even ****gasp**** like ISO formats. Then you do the time format conversion server side. If your application language does not have good locale to timezone formatting mapping, check your database. Many databases provide locale-based customized timezone formatting as well.
Because this anwser still popups in google I share that this is now possible to do by using a readonly datetime-local input (see below) and you can then style the input the way you want:
<input type="datetime-local" value="2018-06-12T19:30" readonly />
For more information see: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/input/datetime-local
Related
we have an existing silverlight app which runs in browser + on hardware.
we want to rewrite this app using angular js and html5.
one of the key requirements with new system is support of internationalization and localization. and target countries are usa, brazil, italy for now.
Am new to this area and have lot of basic questions.
does existing database needs to be redesigned to support same ? i mean to identify columns (product_name/customer_name etc) that needs to have locale specific data and then store data for each locale and modify sprocs and webapi to accept language parameter and then get content based on that. ?
I believe we need to user nvarchar for such columns.
what will happen to currency and date time columns in db ? say there is quantity column then what should be data type of this column in db ? if current locale is Portuguese then will qty stored in Portuguese number.
what is the best practices for storing and retrieving currency column
based on locale.
what is the best practices for storing and retrieving date column
based on locale.
how to handle string checks, numeric checks in webapi methods ?
how to do comparison and checks in javascript for string,number,datetime
please share link to some good pointers which could help.
so in short right from javascript to .net webapi to database (sql) how should we take care of locale dependent logic and fields
thanks.
A lot of questions, let's see if I can answer those.
If your existing application is properly internationalized, I don't think there is any need to modify the database. Just make sure it is able to handle international characters (NCHAR, NVARCHAR, NTEXT in MS SQL, valid character encodings in others).
As for DB design, it is good to keep things locale-independent as long as you can. For instance it is better to store keys in the database and resolve them at runtime. However, if your data is dynamic (i.e. you have product names and their descriptions that changes often), the only way to go is to have translation table and look the data up using valid locale. It's quite complex in relational world (i.e. joins), but it could be done.
2,3. All the numeric columns should be kept locale-independent and formatted on the UI side. The more problematic would be prices and sales orders - you would need an additional column to store the currency code (i.e. 12.34 | USD). On the UI side you would need to pass the code to the Angular currency filter. The only gotcha here is, Angular does not support easy locale context switching, so you would need to use a hacky library like Angular Dynamic Locale to load the formats for you.
Similar. Keep it locale-independent. DB built-in types should automatically handle that for you and give you nice DateTime/DateTimeOffset (in a .Net world) back. The only gotcha would be the time zone - it may make sense to use DATETIMEOFFSET MS SQL type, as others does not store time zone.
There is an alternative way to store date and times in the database - you may decide to store it as a number of milliseconds since January 1, 1970 UTC - as BIGINT type. Especially if you are going to read this directly to JS, you will be able to easily re-create JS Date object (should you need this for calculations or something) in a valid time zone (it works the other way round as well). All you have to do to format date is to use this number (not date, that is AFAIR) and Angular's date filter with UTC as a parameter.
I don't think I understand what you're asking exactly. I guess the question is about validation of user input, rather than API. Well, beware of using Regular Expressions, because JavaScript doesn't handle Unicode well (at least in this area). You'd need to ask more precise question.
Assuming that you have Number and Date objects (i.e. typeof o == 'number') it is straightforward (as in obj1 === obj2).
As far as strings are concerned... Well, str1 === str2 will give you valid answer if you want to be exact. If you want to sort them, modern web browsers (Chrome 14+, Firefox 29+, IE11+) implement EcmaScript 402 Internationalization API so you can do something like str1.localeCompare(str2, locale), see this article.
The real problem occurs when you want to compare two strings case insensitive and accent insensitive for equality (as oppose for ordering like in case of sorting). Basically, there is no way (and this is true even in "big" programming languages like Java or C#).
I'm editing a web based program at the moment. It is used all over the globe. I'm adding a number based field. I want to be able to allow the end user to enter in the number the way they want in their local locale. I see that there is a function called Number.toLocaleString() that will give me what I need. However, I can't seem to find an inverse function.
Take the string "1,000" for example. If my user's locale is en-US, I want it to be interpreted as 1000. If my user's locale is de-DE then it should be interpreted as 1. What is the standard way of doing this in JavaScript?
Javascript has pretty much no locale support beyond just detecting what is set. For that, see the navigator object, and this other question.
If you want locale specific parsing, you'll need to use one of the many libraries out there. Checkout localplanet. It has a formatter for integers and decimals.
the data in the DB look like this
2011-09-07 14:43:22.520
But my Web API outputs the data and replace the space with the letter T
2011-09-07T14:43:22.520
I can replace the letter T with a space again in jquery, but can I fix this problem from the Web API (make the web api output the original data?)
I also do not want the miliseconds at the end. How can I get rid of them?
The format of how you see the date in the database is usually irrelevant, because it should be passed into .Net as a DateTime - not as a string. (If you are storing it as a varchar in the database, you have a bigger problem.)
ASP.Net WebAPI is returning the value in format defined by ISO8601 and RFC3339. This is a good thing, as it is a recognized machine-readable format. You probably don't want to change it.
If you really want to change it, you would need to implement a custom JSON.Net JsonConverter, deriving from DateTimeConverterBase. This is discussed here and here.
But instead, you should consider how you are using the actual result in your client application. You mentioned jQuery, so I will assume your consumer is JavaScript. In many browsers, the ISO8601 value that you have is already recognized by the JavaScript Date constructor, so you might be able to just do this:
var dt = new Date("2011-09-07T14:43:22.520");
But this won't work in all browsers. And Date doesn't have a whole lot of flexibility when it comes to formatting. So instead, you might want to consider a library such as moment.js. With that in place, you can do this:
var m = moment("2011-09-07T14:43:22.520");
var s = m.format("YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss"); // output: "2011-09-07 14:43:22"
Please note that the format string here conforms to moment.js, not to .NET. There are differences in case sensitivity. Please refer to the moment.js documentation for details.
One other thing - since the value you provided doesn't have either a Z at the end, nor does it have an offset such as -07:00, then I assume it came from a DateTime whos .Kind value is DateTimeKind.Unspecified. You should be aware that when this gets sent into JavaScript (or anywhere else for that matter), there is no information about what time zone is represented. JavaScript will assume the local time zone of the browser.
If that's not what you had intended, then you need to store UTC values in your database, and make sure they have DateTimeKind.Utc so they get serialized with a Z at the end. JavaScript will normalize this to the browser's time zone, but you will still be talking about the same moment in time.
Alternatively, you could use a DateTimeOffset type - which would serialize with the specific offset. JavaScript will still normalize this to the user's time zone.
I am looking for recommendations on displaying times in a web application in a time zone other than the user's current time zone.
We store our dates/times in UTC/GMT in the database, so it is not an issue to format the time for UTC/GMT or the user's current time zone. However, in other situations we need to display the time from the point of view of an arbitrary time zone (i.e. every date/time on this page is in Eastern, regardless of whether or not the user is in West Coast, Central, Eastern, etc.).
In the past we have stored offsets or time zone info, then done the calculations in server code in .Net or else we have done some client-side manipulations in javascript that I would prefer to avoid, since it all becomes very dependent on javascript and the user's browser. I'd like to know the best way to do this in a more client-side/MVC type application.
Here is an example:
Date stored in db: 1302790667 (Thu, 14 Apr 2011 14:17:47 GMT)
Converted date displayed for a client in Central time zone: Thu Apr 14 09:17:47 2011
Date I actually want to display, always in Eastern time zone: Thu Apr 14 10:17:47 2011
In the above example, it's easy to get the time in UTC (#1) or the user's current time zone (#2) but it is more difficult to get #3. My options seem to be:
Store offsets or time zones in the db and do calculations on the client - this is what we've done in the past with .Net but it seems even messier in client side code is the path we are currently trying to avoid.
Do the conversion on the server and send down a full date for display to the client - client receives a string ("Thu Apr 14 10:17:47 2011"). This works but it's not very flexible.
Do the conversion on the server, break it into parts and send those down to the client, then put them back together. ("{DayOfWeek:Thu, Month:Apr, Day:14, Hour:10, Minute:17}"). This gives us the correct data and gives us more flexibility in formatting the date but it feels a little wrong for this scenario.
Any other options ideas? How do others handle similar situations? Thanks.
Our results:
I tried out a few libraries like Datejs, MS Ajax, etc. and I was never very happy with them. Datejs didn't work at all in a few of my test cases, is not actively maintained, and seemed to focus a lot on syntactic sugar that we don't need (date.today().first().thursday(), etc.)
We do use jQuery for some basic date/time parsing.
I came across a lot of "roll-your-own" client-side date conversion "hacks", most of which only addressed the conversion to UTC, started off working fine, and then eventually fell apart on some edge case. This one was the 90% solution for a lot of standard UTC conversion but didn't solve our "arbitrary timezone" issue.
Between the code complexity the conversion routines added and the bugs they seemed to cause, we decided to avoid client side date processing most of the time. We do the date conversions on the server with our existing date handling routines and pass the formatted dates or info down as properties to be used by the view. If we need a separate date, we just add another property. There are usually only a few properties that we need at a time (i.e. EventDateUTC, EventDateLocal, EventDateAlwaysAustralia, and EventDayOfWeek).
I offer the suggestion that you look into the Datejs library. It offers a bunch of extensions to basic JavaScript date manipulation, including a "setTimezone()" method and flexible ways to convert a date into a formatted string for display.
I usually hesitate to suggest libraries when their use is not explicitly allowed for in questions, but Datejs isn't very large and it's pretty solid (even though it's called an "alpha" release). If you'd prefer not to rely on something like that, you might want to look at it anyway just to see the basics of how its extensions were implemented.
We know that different locales use different date and number formats, but what about time formats? There are certainly fewer ways to format time values than date values.
I have a field in a web application that accepts a time value as free text, hour and minute only. Suppose that the field allows only one of the following formats for all locales.
23:59
2359
12:59p
p12:59
Note that "p" and ":" are customizable for each locale.
Would this be too much restriction for a localizable application supporting non-English locales? I'm asking since there's no built-in parser for time values in JavaScript and it seems that most projects build their own mini parser.
Maybe what you are looking for is JQuery Time Picker. I don't think any of these plugins support JQuery Regional scripts, but at least it should be easier to create your own localized settings instead building a parser...
If you still want to build a parser, go for it although trying to support all possible combination (like "6:40", "06:40", "6:40 P.M.") would be at least problematic. As Stefan mentioned, it is easier to do just some kind of drop-down boxes (personally I hate them as they require clicking). Otherwise you may create to text fields: one for hour part and the second one for minutes and add drop-down for selecting AM/PM conditionally (that is if preferred format for this locale is 12 hours).
What about time zones? I'd recommend that the user time zone would be in use, but the time would be then converted to UTC and stored as such internally...