You want to use a locale other than the default in a particular operation.

Use Locale.getInstance(Locale) .

Classes that provide formatting services, such as DateFormat and NumberFormat, provide an overloaded getInstance( ) method that can be called either with no arguments or with a Locale argument.

To use these, you can use one of the predefined locale variables provided by the Locale class, or you can construct your own Locale object giving a language code and a country code:

Locale locale1 = Locale.FRANCE;    // predefined
Locale locale2 = new Locale("en", "UK");    // English, UK version

Either of these can be used to format a date or a number, as shown in class UseLocales :

import java.text.*;
import java.util.*;

/** Use some locales
 * choices or -Duser.lang= or -Duser.region=.
 */
public class UseLocales {
    public static void main(String[] args) {

        Locale frLocale = Locale.FRANCE;    // predefined
        Locale ukLocale = new Locale("en", "UK");    // English, UK version

        DateFormat defaultDateFormatter = DateFormat.getDateInstance(
            DateFormat.MEDIUM);
        DateFormat frDateFormatter = DateFormat.getDateInstance(
            DateFormat.MEDIUM, frLocale);
        DateFormat ukDateFormatter = DateFormat.getDateInstance(
            DateFormat.MEDIUM, ukLocale);

        Date now = new Date(  );
        System.out.println("Default: " + ' ' +
            defaultDateFormatter.format(now));
        System.out.println(frLocale.getDisplayName(  ) + ' ' +
            frDateFormatter.format(now));
        System.out.println(ukLocale.getDisplayName(  ) + ' ' +
            ukDateFormatter.format(now));
    }
}

The program prints the locale name and formats the date in each of the locales:

$ java UseLocales
Default:  Nov 30, 2000
French (France) 30 nov. 00
English (UK) Nov 30, 2000
$