Localizing numbers and dates

This section describes how to write and install a plug-in for doing your own localization of numbers and dates, if the facilities provided with the product are inadequate for your needs.

It is possible to define a localized numbering sequence for use by xsl:number and format-date(). This sequence will be used when you specify a language in the lang attribute of the xsl:number element, or in the third argument of the functions format-date(), format-time(), and format-dateTime(). The feature is primarily intended to provide language-dependent numbers and dates, but in fact it can be used to provide arbitrary numbering sequences.

Additional numbering sequences are available as described in Numberings for selected languages.

To implement a numberer for language X, you need to define a class that implements the interface Numberer; usually it will be convenient to write the class as a subclass of the supplied AbstractNumberer.

Normally your localization class will extend the class AbstractNumberer so that you can reuse functionality like roman numerals which do not need to be localized. Alternatively, if you only want to modify the existing English localization, you could choose to implement a subclass of Numberer_en.

You can override any of the non-private methods in the base class, but the most useful ones to implement are the following:

Method	Effect
ordinalSuffix	Supplies a suffix to be appended to a number to create the ordinal form, for example "1" becomes "1st" in English
toWords	Displays a number in words, in title case: for example "53" becomes "Fifty Three" in English
toOrdinalWords	Displays an ordinal number in words, in title case: for example "53" becomes "Fifty Third" in English
monthName	Displays the name of a month, optionally abbreviated
dayName	Displays the name of a day of the week, optionally abbreviated

The class name can be anything you like, but by convention the Numberer for language LL is named net.sf.saxon.option.local.Numberer_LL.

There are two ways to register the numberer with the Saxon Configuration.

The first is to supply a LocalizerFactory that responds to the request for a particular language, for example:

Configuration config = new Configuration(); config.setLocalizerFactory(new LocalizerFactory() { public Numberer getNumberer(String language, String country) { if (language.equals("jp")) { return Numberer_JP.getInstance(); } else { return null; } } }

The alternative is to register the localization module in the configuration file.