Format date without year

Question

How can create text representation of some date, that takes locale into account and contains only day and month (no year)?

Following code gives me s

Answer 1

You could use regex to trim off all y's and any non-alphabetic characters before and after, if any. Here's a kickoff example:

public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
    for (Locale locale : Locale.getAvailableLocales()) {
        DateFormat df = getShortDateInstanceWithoutYears(locale);
        System.out.println(locale + ": " + df.format(new Date()));      
    }
}

public static DateFormat getShortDateInstanceWithoutYears(Locale locale) {
    SimpleDateFormat sdf = (SimpleDateFormat) DateFormat.getDateInstance(DateFormat.SHORT, locale);
    sdf.applyPattern(sdf.toPattern().replaceAll("[^\\p{Alpha}]*y+[^\\p{Alpha}]*", ""));
    return sdf;
}

You see that this snippet tests it for all locales as well. It looks to work fine for all locales here.