Capitalized tag != capitalized month

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2010/04/16 07:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/04/16/9997102.aspx


The question was simple enough:

I noticed that the long date format in Windows 7 is shown as “d’ de ‘MMMM’ de ‘yyyy” (Spanish) which is in upper case but still the month is displayed in  lower case.

Luckily the answer is simple, too! :-)

The uppercase MMMM in the long date, just as the uppercase MM above it in the short date, are not an indication that the month is to be capitalized or not.

After all, MM is going to put a number in there!

The uppercase M is used to indicate that something is to be done with the month!

 The lowercase m has another purpose - it is used for thwe minutes, as you can see in the short time and long time formats right below the date formats.

Windows never overlaps these two, but they are kept this separate due to the fact that several years ago a decision wtheas made that using M and m in this way was less confusing then case insensitive format tags and using another letter for one of them, e.g. M and N.

This is just as well since in .Net you can have the date and time format in the same string, which would have forced a different solution anyway....

Whether the month name is capitalized is part of the underlying locale data and in ordinary circumstances is neither override-able nor customizable!


w3cvalidation on 20 Apr 2010 6:12 AM:

Nice information, I really appreciate the way you presented.Thanks for sharing..


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2010/05/18 All right, guys, uh, listen. This is a locale in Windows, watch me for the changes, and try and keep up, okay?

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