Is there a .NET Culture dependent 'Today' string?

Question

I am writing a month calendar style control and need to display a string that indicates today's date. So on an English culture machine it would show 'Today : 11/02/2009'. If a different culture happens to be used, such as French, then I would like to use the French word for 'Today'. Does anyone know if the .NET platform exposes this word as part of the culture information so I can retrieve it automatically? I cannot find anything exposed but maybe I am not looking in the right place.

Answer 1

This is a pretty comprehensive overview of .Net localization.

In a nutshell, methods of the DateTime structure will format the date based on the system locale. You can override the default locale by specifying your own.

Edit: Sorry, I misread your question. No, there is no such thing. You could use a translation site to get the translations of 'Today' that you need to support, and keep them in a dictionary in your code. Upon closer examination, though, I would not recommend this at all, since the resulting string "Today: xx/xx/xxx" may feel awkward in other languages. While the German version: "Heute: 11.2.2009", or the French "Aujour'hui: 11.2.2009" seem to work ok in a calendar, I can't say for Chinese or Japanese. This illustrates the issues that you can run into when you think localization is just translation.

Answer 2

Old.. but still useful (how old? VB6 old).

Basically Windows keeps a localized version of "Today" in Comctl32.dll. You can fish it out with a a loadstringex call:

Private Const IDM_TODAY As Long = 4163
Private Const IDM_GOTODAY As Long = 4164

Public Function GetTodayLocalized(ByVal LocaleId As Long) As String
    Static hComCtl32 As Long
    Static hComCtl32Initialized As Boolean
    Static hComCtl32MustBeFreed As Boolean

    Dim s As String

    If Not hComCtl32Initialized Then
        hComCtl32 = GetModuleHandle("Comctl32.dll")
        If hComCtl32 <> 0 Then
            hComCtl32MustBeFreed = False
            hComCtl32Initialized = True
        Else
            hComCtl32 = LoadLibrary("Comctl32.Dll")
            If Not hComCtl32 = 0 Then
                hComCtl32MustBeFreed = True
                hComCtl32Initialized = True
            End If
        End If
    End If

    If hComCtl32Initialized = False Then
        s = "Today"
    Else
        s = LoadStringEx(hComCtl32, IDM_TODAY, LocaleId)
        If s = "" Then
            s = "Today"
        End If
    End If

    If hComCtl32MustBeFreed Then
        FreeLibrary hComCtl32
        hComCtl32MustBeFreed = False
        hComCtl32Initialized = False
        hComCtl32 = 0
    End If

    s = Replace(s, "&", "")
    If Right(s, 1) = ":" Then
        s = Left(s, Len(s) - 1)
    End If

    GetTodayLocalized = s
End Function