How to get the first day of week for a certain Locale / Country

Question

I need to get the first day of week for a certain Locale / Country.

I tried to find it using this code:

final Locale[] locales = new Locale[]{
        new Locale("en_GB"),
        new Locale("ru_RU"),
        new Locale("en_US"),                
        new Locale("es_ES"),
        new Locale("fr_FR"),        
        new Locale("iw_IL"),
        new Locale("he_IL")
};

for (final Locale locale : locales) {
    final Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance(locale);
    final int firstDayOfWeek = cal.getFirstDayOfWeek();
    System.out.println(firstDayOfWeek);
}

The result of this code is that all of these locales are retrieving '1' which is Sunday, and locales such en_US should return 2 which is Monday.

Answer 1

Pass in two arguments – language & country , separately – rather than your string with underscore. See Oracle Tutorial .

final Locale[] locales = new Locale[]{
        new Locale("en", "GB"),  // Pass language code, then country code, separately.
        new Locale("ru", "RU"),
        new Locale("en", "US"),
        new Locale("es", "ES"),
        new Locale("fr", "FR"),
        new Locale("iw", "IL"),
        new Locale("he", "IL")
    };

And then I would use Java8 to get the first day of the week:

DayOfWeek firstDayOfWeek = WeekFields.of(locale).getFirstDayOfWeek();
System.out.println(firstDayOfWeek);

Output:

MONDAY

MONDAY

SUNDAY

MONDAY

MONDAY

SUNDAY

SUNDAY

Answer 2

You have a mistake in initializing the Locale , you need to pass two arguments language and country . The single argument constructor is only for language .

For example for Locale("en_GB") , should be Locale("en", "GB") , and then the result will be 2.

BTW for Locale("en", "US") the result is 1 (Sunday).