Reliably getting a formatted time string in ur desired lang

Today, i'm spent quite abit of time playing with the very simple Time#strftime:

1 2	puts Time.now.strftime("%B %d, %Y %H:%M") # >> August 06, 2010 17:17

What i want to acheive is to reliably get the chinese version:

八月 06, 2010 17:24

I've tried playing with the environment variable $LANG:

$ export LANG=zh_CN.utf8
$ locale
LANG=zh_CN.utf8
LC_CTYPE="zh_CN.utf8"
LC_NUMERIC="zh_CN.utf8"
LC_TIME="zh_CN.utf8"
LC_COLLATE="zh_CN.utf8"
LC_MONETARY="zh_CN.utf8"
LC_MESSAGES="zh_CN.utf8"
LC_PAPER="zh_CN.utf8"
LC_NAME="zh_CN.utf8"
LC_ADDRESS="zh_CN.utf8"
LC_TELEPHONE="zh_CN.utf8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="zh_CN.utf8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="zh_CN.utf8"
LC_ALL=

Seems good, but nope, Time#strftime still gives me the same english output. I've trying recompiling a different ruby using rvm with the exported $LANG ... nope, doesn't work either. It seems that not matter how $LANG is set (thus affecting LC_TIME), ruby just doesn't care abt it. Yet, i swear that on flyhzm's machine, he has been getting the chinese version, no matter how hard he has tried to get the english version.

Battled, beaten & worn out, i've concluded that the most reliable way (and definitely what most people do), is to use the i18n. Given i already have this /path/to/i18n.yml:

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en: date: month_names: [~, January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December] time: formats: default: "%B %d, %Y %H:%M" zh: date: month_names: [~, 一月, 二月, 三月, 四月, 五月, 六月, 七月, 八月, 九月, 十月, 十一月, 十二月] time: formats: default: "%B %d, %Y %H:%M"

The following works for mri 1.9.1:

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require 'rubygems' require 'i18n' I18n.load_path << '/tmp/i18n.yml' p I18n.available_locales # >> [:en, :zh] I18n.locale = :en p I18n.localize(Time.now) # >> "August 06, 2010 17:48" I18n.locale = :zh p I18n.localize(Time.now) # >> "八月 06, 2010 17:48"

Without modication, i got the following unfriendly output for the chinese port under mri 1.8.7, jruby & ree-1.8.7:

\345\205\253\346\234\210 06, 2010 20:27

After much googling, stumbled across this post abt $KCODE. Here's the final modified code for the 1.8.7 equivalents:

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require 'rubygems' require 'i18n' $KCODE = 'UTF-8' # Hey, this matters !! I18n.locale = :en p I18n.localize(Time.now) # >> "August 06, 2010 17:48" I18n.locale = :zh p I18n.localize(Time.now) # >> "八月 06, 2010 17:48"

For people doing rails, here are some useful resources:
* http://guides.rubyonrails.org/i18n.html
* http://github.com/svenfuchs/rails-i18n