CultureInfo.CurrentCulture is giving me the wrong culture

Question

I'm trying to get my clients' country, so I use CultureInfo.CurrentCulture. Problem is that when my Canadian customers use my website, they're showing up as American.

It looks like CultureInfo.CurrentCulture is returning my server's country instead of their country. So how do I get my clients' country?

Answer 1

I believe you need to write code to read the user's culture from the incoming browser request, and set your CultureInfo from that.

This fellow describes how they do it: Set the display culture for the current thread to the most appropriate culture from the user's incoming Http "request" object.

He has an excellent discussion there, but this is basically how he does it:

In Page_Load, they make this call: UIUtilities.setCulture(Request);

Where this is what gets called:

/// Set the display culture for the current thread to the most
/// appropriate culture from the user's incoming Http "request" object.
internal static void setCulture(HttpRequest request)
{
    if (request != null)
    {
      if (request.UserLanguages != null)
      {
        if (request.UserLanguages.Length > -1)
        {
          string cultureName = request.UserLanguages[0];
          UIUtilities.setCulture(cultureName);
        }
      }
        // TODO: Set to a (system-wide, or possibly user-specified) default
        // culture if the browser didn't give us any clues.
    }
}

/// Set the display culture for the current thread to a particular named culture.
/// <param name="cultureName">The name of the culture to be set 
/// for the thread</param>
private static void setCulture(string cultureName)
{
    Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = 
        CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture(cultureName);
    Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = new
        CultureInfo(cultureName);
}

Answer 2

You just need to set the culture attribute to auto in your web.config file:

<system.web>
    <globalization culture="auto" />
<system.web>

This will automatically set the CurrentCulture to the client's culture.

You can also set uiCulture to auto if you're using localized resources.