What is the difference between CurrentCulture and CurrentUICulture properties of CultureInfo in .NET?

.net globalization cultureinfo
splattne picture splattne · Nov 30, 2008 · Viewed 75.6k times · Source

In .NET there is the CultureInfo class in the System.Globalization namespace. It has two similar properties both returning values of the CultureInfo type: CurrentCulture and CurrentUICulture.

What is the difference between them?

Which one should I use when and why?

Answer

Tomalak picture Tomalak · Nov 30, 2008

CurrentCulture is the .NET representation of the default user locale of the system. This controls default number and date formatting and the like.

CurrentUICulture refers to the default user interface language, a setting introduced in Windows 2000. This is primarily regarding the UI localization/translation part of your app.

Whatever regional options the system is configured to have will be the "Current" values in your .NET app.

Often times they are both the same. But on my system they would be different: I prefer my numbers and dates in the German format, so the CurrentCulture would be German, but I also prefer all my applications in English, so the CurrentUICulture would be English.

There is a nice article on the topic: Sorting it all Out: Why we have both CurrentCulture and CurrentUICulture

Related questions

ToString("0") versus ToString(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture)

I would like to make sure that certain numbers in my application are printed without any separators, groupings etc. no matter what the current environment is. It seems that the following two methods produce the same results (there are possibly …

Read More
What cultures are supported by the CultureInfo class in .NET 3.5?

I need a list of cultures that are supported by .NET 3.5, regardless of the OS used. This seems to be quite a struggle to obtain, though I am not sure why! Edit: Arghh, I was not aware that it is …

Read More
How can I detect the encoding/codepage of a text file

In our application, we receive text files (.txt, .csv, etc.) from diverse sources. When reading, these files sometimes contain garbage, because the files where created in a different/unknown codepage. Is there a way to (automatically) detect the codepage of …

Read More