Issues with System Language / Locale of testers / end-users

[shamussy]

Hi,

This was a problem that I least expect would affect the stability of any program. After today's PE, my group was fortunate enough to be tested by an international audience of testers and made this problem known. (Better now than in 1.4)

First Issue:

What was supposed to happen and what my team expected to happen.

Notice that the date dynamically changes from a conventional english Day/Month in full spelling/Year to a date format in chinese characters? I suspect this screws up the exporting of data to permanent storage and then importing it back as well and I am not sure how things will happen when importing chinese characters.... Is there a way to force a certain language / locale? What happens when we force a system locale that is not available to the test user? E.g. A laptop bought in China with a China windows 10 version might not be able to change the system language to english unless the version of windows 10 is of international version.

https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/798pft/laptop_bought_in_china_trying_to_change_the/

Second Issue:
As my tester had another locale(french), all double printed in 2 decimal places had a comma ',' seperating the dollars and cents instead of a fullstop '.'
AY1920S1-CS2113T-W17-3/main#192 (comment)

http://zetcode.com/java/numberformat/?fbclid=IwAR2asqtTzW1-auVZlDbA9hsUkOCdfXsg5vQR3zZHswqjB1vk404jfMuKteo

Numbers are formatted differently for different locales. For instance, some countries use a dot as a decimal separator (USA, Great Britain), others use a comma (Slovakia, France).

@okkhoy Do you have any inputs on this?

[okkhoy]

Sorry, I don't remember how this was handled in previous years.

I suspect, we asked students to make the project "English" only and asked testers to switch locales to English (US) for the testing session (but I really don't remember how we handled this 😞)
I think it is fair to mention the language restriction in the user guide.

Take a look at these if you are interested in programmatically fixing such issues:
https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/i18n/index.html
https://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/ResourceBundle.html