an unstealthy icu4j upgrade
IBM has announced a maintenance release for icu4j, version 3.4.3. among the goodies for this version are:- Olson 2006a time zone data (just in time to get ready for the new DST in the US)
- corrects mistakes in the CLDR data found in icu4j 3.4.2
- MessageFormat (like core java's but it can use icu4j's super cool ULocale class) upgraded to @stable"
- fixed bugs in DateFormat, SimpleDateFormat, etc.
- and a bit more trivial (to me) but should make some folks happy this release no longer tags "@draft" APIs with "@deprecated" by default--though why they ever did that in the first place is a bit of a mystery to me
the MessageFormat class is kind of cool in that it handles compound rb strings (which i'd rather have never learned about) such as: "At {1} on {2}, there was {3} on planet {4}". in the past, we normally handled this with in-house methods which are somewhat cumbersome in that we needed to do any date/numeric/currency formatting on the substituted values for the message's placeholders (the bits in between the {}) prior to formatting the message. now using the com.ibm.icu.text.MessageFormat you could do something like:
<cfscript>
mfObject=createobject("java","com.ibm.icu.text.MessageFormat");
args=arrayNew(1);
args[1]=now();
args[2]="the office";
args[3]="microbrewery";
// pass in the message string and substitution arguments thisMsg=mfObject.format("On {0,date,full} at {0,time,full}, I left {1} for the {2}.",args);
writeoutput(thisMsg);
</cfscript>
mfObject=createobject("java","com.ibm.icu.text.MessageFormat");
args=arrayNew(1);
args[1]=now();
args[2]="the office";
args[3]="microbrewery";
// pass in the message string and substitution arguments thisMsg=mfObject.format("On {0,date,full} at {0,time,full}, I left {1} for the {2}.",args);
writeoutput(thisMsg);
</cfscript>
which would produce something like (in the en_US locale) "On Wednesday, March 1, 2006 at 8:44:22 PM GMT+07:00, I left the office for the microbrewery.".
to explain a bit more : {0,date,full} is a placeholder that takes the first element in the args array (java arrays start at 0) and applies localized date formatting with the "full" style. {0,time,full} ditto but uses time formatting and {1} and {2} are placeholders for simple strings.
however in order to make this more flexible (ie. use locales other than the server's default), you'll have to use a simple java wrapper class--the MessageFormat format method is overloaded and coldfusion can't easily use it's other "flavors" which require StringBuffer and FieldPosition classes.
posted by Paul Hastings @ 12:27 AM
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