How do I find out whether a locale uses 12 or 24 hour time in Java?

Question

In Java, I want to print just the time of day in hours and minutes and want it to correctly switch between, e.g., \"13:00\" and \"1:00 PM\" according to the locale. How do I

Answer 1

I have written small function which detects whether current locale uses 24 or 12 hours:

public static boolean is24HourLocale() {
    String output = SimpleDateFormat.getTimeInstance(DateFormat.SHORT).format(new Date());
    if (output.contains(" AM") || output.contains(" PM")) {
        return false;
    } else {
        return true;
    }
}