by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2008/03/29 10:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2008/03/29/8342675.aspx
Content of Michael Kaplan's personal blog not approved by Microsoft (see disclaimer)!
The question seemed so simple (as it usually does):
Could you please explain me: why when I have the Arabic (Saudi Arabia) locale then the full date time format (“dddd, MMMM dd, yyyy HH:mm:ss”) actually looks as “dd tt hh:mm:ss MMMM, yyyy”. And opposite if conversation was done with the "dd tt hh:mm:ss MMMM, yyyy" pattern the result starts with substring "dd MMMM, yyyy"? Thanks for your attention.
Luckily sometimes the answer is simple, too! :-)
Let's take a look at this locale in Regional and Language Options, like right here:
and hit that Customize this format... button to get to the detail dialog about date formats.
Believe it or not, this is expected -- it is basically something you can look at two different ways, both of which are technically valid (though the second is probably "more" valid!):
The format strings themselves are using Latin script characters, which are always going to be normally used in a left-to-right context, while in the case of Arabic the actual string that has been formatted and which includes Arabic text will be displayed in a right-to-left context. So what appears on the surface to be a "reversed" string is actually just at RTL formatted string based on an LTR format string.
The format strings themselves are in logical order, which is always left-to-right and independent of how the final strings would be visibly displayed, while the formatted string in a language like Arabic will be displayed in a visual order that will be right-to-left.
So nothing is really in the wrong order, and things are mostly behaving as they are designed to.
I'll talk about when things get a little weird in a new blog some day.... :-)
This blog sponsored by غ (U+063a, aka ARABIC LETTER GHAIN)
lewis on 29 Mar 2008 10:19 AM:
what are those large fluid filled structural abnormalities in yer brain?
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