Friday 30 September 2011

Who says I don’t know anything about Culture

I’ve just had a good dose today, because I got bit doing some csv export for a customer in Germany.  As a dyed in the wool C++ programmer, the move to C#/.NET contains a few unexpected gotchas.
Today’s?  The culture used by string.Format() isn’t at all like the one used by sprintf.
It turns out that though they both use the current culture/locale for the thread, in C++, that’s set to the C_LOCALE, whereas in C#, it’s set to the current culture of the operating system.
So in France for example, 1,000.45 gets printed like this: 1 000,45
That’s really going to mess up your CSV.
Of course, you can specify a culture in every print, but really, who’s going to remember to do that, and even then I haven’t checked if it gets passed down to the ToString method when formatted as {0} with no specifier.
So, I really need to do something like this:
CultureInfo ciEntry = Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture;
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = new CultureInfo(String.Empty);

// do my culture invariant work here...

Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = ciEntry;



And, remember to do it on thread pool methods too, because who knows what Culture they were last looking about.

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