ACTIONSCRIPT 3 Developer’s Guide en

ACTIONSCRIPT 3.0 DEVELOPER’S GUIDE
Internationalizing applications
Locale A value that represents the language and cultural conventions used in a geographical, political, or cultural
region (which in many cases indicates a single country). A unique locale identifier (locale ID) represents this value.
The locale ID is used to look up a set of locale data that provides locale-specific support. This support applies to
measurement units, the parsing and formatting of numbers and dates, and so on.
Resource Bundle A stored set of locale-specific elements that are created for a locale in which an application is used.
A resource bundle typically contains all text elements in the application’s user interface. Within the bundle, these
elements are translated into the appropriate language for the given locale. It can also contain other settings that alter
the layout or behavior of the user interface for a specific locale. A resource bundle can contain other media types, or
references to other media types, that are locale-specific.
Overview of the flash.globalization package
Flash Player 10.1 and later, Adobe AIR 2.0 and later
The flash.globalization package harnesses the cultural support capabilities of the underlying operating system. It
makes it easier to write applications that follow the cultural conventions of individual users.
The main classes in the package include:
The Collator class which governs the sorting and matching of strings
The CurrencyFormatter class which formats numbers into currency amount strings, and parses currency amounts
and symbols from input strings
The DateTimeFormatter class which formats date values
The LocaleID class for retrieving information about a specific locale
The NumberFormatter class which formats and parses numeric values
The StringTools class which handles locale-sensitive case conversion of strings
The flash.globalization package and resource localization
The flash.globalization package doesn’t handle resource localization. However you can use the flash.globalization
locale ID as the key value for retrieving localized resources using other techniques. For example, you can localize
application resources built with Flex using the ResourceManager and ResourceBundle classes. For more information,
see Localizing Flex Applications.
Adobe AIR 1.1 also contains some features to help localize AIR applications, as discussed in “Localizing AIR
applications” on page 957.
A general approach to internationalizing an application
The following steps describe a high-level common approach for internationalizing an application using the
flash.globalization package:
1 Determine or set the locale.
2 Create an instance of a service class (Collator, CurrencyFormatter, DateTimeFormatter, NumberFormatter, or
StringTools).
3 Check for errors and fallbacks using lastOperationStatus properties.
4 Format and display information using locale-specific settings.
Last updated 6/6/2012
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