How do I get localized date pattern string?

Question

It is quite easy to format and parse Java Date (or Calendar) classes using instance of DateFormat, i.e. I could format current date into short localize date like this:

Answer 1

Please find in the below code which accepts the locale instance and returns the locale specific data format/pattern.

 public static String getLocaleDatePattern(Locale locale) {
    // Validating if Locale instance is null
    if (locale == null || locale.getLanguage() == null) {
        return "MM/dd/yyyy";
    }
    // Fetching the locale specific date pattern
    String localeDatePattern = ((SimpleDateFormat) DateFormat.getDateInstance(
            DateFormat.SHORT, locale)).toPattern();
    // Validating if locale type is having language code for Chinese and country 
    // code for (Hong Kong) with Date Format as - yy'?'M'?'d'?'
    if (locale.toString().equalsIgnoreCase("zh_hk")) {
        // Expected application Date Format for Chinese (Hong Kong) locale type
        return "yyyy'MM'dd";
    }
    // Replacing all d|m|y OR Gy with dd|MM|yyyy as per the locale date pattern
    localeDatePattern = localeDatePattern.replaceAll("d{1,2}", "dd").replaceAll(
            "M{1,2}", "MM").replaceAll("y{1,4}|Gy", "yyyy");
    // Replacing all blank spaces in the locale date pattern
    localeDatePattern = localeDatePattern.replace(" ", "");
    // Validating the date pattern length to remove any extract characters
    if (localeDatePattern.length() > 10) {
        // Keeping the standard length as expected by the application
        localeDatePattern = localeDatePattern.substring(0, 10);
    }
    return localeDatePattern;
}