Finally, we come to internationalization. Before, we would need to internationalize such things as dates, number formats, and even currencies. We would use special lookups or converters that would do this for us. With the newer versions of ECMAScript, we have gained support for getting these new formats with the built-in Intl object. Some of the use cases can be seen as follows:
const amount = 1478.99;
console.log(new Intl.NumberFormat('en-UK', {style : 'currency', currency : 'EUR'}).format(amount));
console.log(new Intl.NumberFormat('de-DE', {style : 'currency', currency : 'EUR'}).format(amount));
const date = new Date(0);
console.log(new Intl.DateTimeFormat('en-UK').format(date));
console.log(new Intl.DateTimeFormat('de-DE').format(date));
With this, we can now internationalize our system depending on where someone may be located or what language they choose at the start of our application.
This will only perform conversions of the numbers to the stylings for that country code; it will not try to convert the actual values since options such as currency change within the course of the day. If we need to perform such conversions, we will need to use an API. On top of this, if we want to translate something, we will still need to have separate lookups for what we need to put in text since there is no direct translation between languages.
With these awesome features added in the ECMAScript standard, let's now move onto a way to encapsulate functions and data that go together. To do this, we will use classes and modules.