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.

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, or if you want to use English as a fallback, the class Numberer_en which is itself a subclass of AbstractNumberer.

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 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.