How to get system's Locale (not application's) in android

Question

I am writing an app that has an option menu, with three options for language : automatic, english , greek.

When the user changes the setting, I save it in shared preferences, and call my starting activity with the new task flag

when that activity starts (before even setContentView) I call the following method:

        string language = MainApplication.Language; //this is from shared preferences
        if (language == null || language.Equals("auto")) {
            language = Java.Util.Locale.Default.Language; //if language is not set, or the setting is auto then load the default language
            MainApplication.Language = "auto"; //save into the shared preferences that the language was set to auto
        }
        App.instance.set_language(language); //update the data layer's language
        Java.Util.Locale locale = new Java.Util.Locale(language); 
        Java.Util.Locale.Default = locale; //change the default locale
        Configuration config = new Configuration();//create a new configuration and set its locale
        config.Locale = locale;
        Application.Context.Resources.UpdateConfiguration(config, null);//update the system locale

The above is written in Xamarin, so it's C# but it's the same code for java

My problem is that if I change the language to greek for example, when the code above runs it sets the default locale to "el" , but if the user selects the automatic option after that , because the default locale for the application is "el" it preserves that setting, even though my system language is english.

when I restart the application it works correctly because the application's default locale is that of the system

so my question is, is there a way to get the system's locale and not the applications?

p.s. I know that I can always store the system's locale in Application and change it in OnConfigurationChanged ,I was just wandering if there is another way

https://developer.android.com/reference/java/util/Locale.html#getDefault() — Alex Chengalan, Jun 01 '16 at 08:36
no , as I said this returns the locale that I have set at the onCreate method of the main activity, I want to get the locale of the system — Cruces, Jun 01 '16 at 08:38
maybe this helps? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23348954/android-get-device-locale — cherry-wave, Jun 01 '16 at 09:25

score 5 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:31

5

You can get it by adb shell getprop | grep locale

It will print similar output like:

[persist.sys.locale]: [tr-TR]
[ro.product.locale]: [tr-TR]

So you can run a process as:

Process process = Runtime.getRunTime().exec("getprop");

and check the output string with a BufferedReader.

or basically check this answer.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:31

Community

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answered Jun 01 '16 at 09:02

Burak Day

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How to get system's Locale (not application's) in android

1 Answers1