How do you format the day of the month to say “11th”, “21st” or “23rd” (ordinal indicator)?

Question

I know this will give me the day of the month as a number (11, 21, 23):

SimpleDateFormat formatDayOfMonth = new Simple         


        

Answer 1

If you try to be aware of i18n the solution get even more complicated.

The problem is that in other languages the suffix may depend not only on the number itself, but also on the noun it counts. For example in Russian it would be "2-ой день", but "2-ая неделя" (these mean "2nd day", but "2nd week"). This is not apply if we formatting only days, but in a bit more generic case you should be aware of complexity.

I think nice solution (I didn't have time to actually implement) would be to extend SimpleDateFormetter to apply Locale-aware MessageFormat before passing to the parent class. This way you would be able to support let say for March formats %M to get "3-rd", %MM to get "03-rd" and %MMM to get "third". From outside this class looks like regular SimpleDateFormatter, but supports more formats. Also if this pattern would be by mistake applied by regular SimpleDateFormetter the result would be incorrectly formatted, but still readable.