How to get current regional settings in C#?

Question

Normally you can get it by writing something like

CultureInfo currentCulture = Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture;

But this way you can only get CultureInfo which was configured at the moment application was launched and will not update if the setting have been changed afterwards.

So, how to get CultureInfo currently configured in Control Panel -> Regional and Language Settings?

Answer 1

As @Christian proposed ClearCachedData is the method to use. But according to MSDN:

The ClearCachedData method does not refresh the information in the Thread.CurrentCulture property for existing threads

So you will need to first call the function and then start a new thread. In this new thread you can use the CurrentCulture to obtain the fresh values of the culture.

class Program
{
    private class State
    {
        public CultureInfo Result { get; set; }
    }

    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture.ClearCachedData();
        var thread = new Thread(
            s => ((State)s).Result = Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture);
        var state = new State();
        thread.Start(state);
        thread.Join();
        var culture = state.Result;
        // Do something with the culture
    }

}

Note, that if you also need to reset CurrentUICulture, you should do it separately

Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture.ClearCachedData()