Improving on SimpleDateFormat

I'm a big fan of SimpleDateFormat, but it suffers from one critical problem. Your date format is forced on the user. I've learnt the hard way (as have most developers) that American's have their own date format (mm/dd/yyyy), us Brits have our own format (dd/mm/yy) and of course there are many other countries that also have different ideas.

Using SimpleDateFormat means you pick a format and the user has to like it. In some cases this could even be very frustrating for the user. You could of course allow them to pick their own format, but that's a lot of work.

My point here is Android has a little used method of doing this hard work for you and it utilizes the user's locale as set in the phone settings, to calculate this format. That is java.text.DateFormat.
So if the user has English American locale, then DateFormat will use that, if it has en-UK then that's the format it'll use. Magic!

import java.text.DateFormat;
DateFormat dateTimeFormat;


dateTimeFormat = DateFormat.getDateTimeInstance(DateFormat.MEDIUM, DateFormat.SHORT, Locale.getDefault());


Date date = new Date();
dateTimeFormat.format(date);

Next time you're displaying a date or a time, why not try using DateFormat instead of forcing your format on the user?