How to display Arabic dates in the Gregorian calendar?

Question

I have a multilingual ASP.NET site; one of the languages ​​is Arabic (ar-SA). To switch between cultures, I use this code:

Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture(Name) Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = New CultureInfo(Name) 

When displaying the date of an article, for example, I just do this, and the localization API takes care of everything:

 <%#Eval("DatelineDate","{0:d MMMM yyyy}")%> 

The problem is that it displays dates using the Hijiri (Islamic) calendar (for example, 2008 is displayed as 1429). The client wants to display dates using the Gregorian calendar (as before, of course, the names of the month and everything else is in Arabic). How can i do this?

Answer 1

Answer:

It turns out that the ar-SA culture is the only one using the Hijiri calendar; all other Arab cultures use the Gregorian language. Here are the different date formats in Arabic (a little messed up because WMD doesn't support, it seems to support RTL text).

 ar-AE 11 ديسمبر 2008 ar-BH 11 ديسمبر 2008 ar-DZ 11 ديسمبر 2008 ar-EG 11 ديسمبر 2008 ar-IQ 11 كانون الأول 2008 ar-JO 11 كانون الأول 2008 ar-KW 11 ديسمبر 2008 ar-LB 11 كانون الأول 2008 ar-LY 11 ديسمبر 2008 ar-MA 11 دجنبر 2008 ar-OM 11 ديسمبر 2008 ar-QA 11 ديسمبر 2008 ar-SA 13 ذو الحجة 1429 ar-SY 11 كانون الأول 2008 ar-TN 11 ديسمبر 2008 ar-YE 11 ديسمبر 2008 

And why is there a quick and dirty code that I used to create this list:

  Response.Write("<table width=300px>") For Each ci As CultureInfo In (From c As CultureInfo In CultureInfo.GetCultures(CultureTypes.AllCultures) Order By c.Name Where c.Name.StartsWith("ar-")) Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = CultureInfo.GetCultureInfo(ci.Name) Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = New CultureInfo(ci.Name) Response.Write(String.Format("<tr><td>{0}</td> <td style='direction:rtl;font-size:20px;'>{1:d MMMM yyyy}</td></tr>", ci.Name, Today)) Next Response.Write("</table>") Response.End() 

Other cultures at http://www.massimilianobianchi.info/max/articles/22/UI-culture-list-and-codes.aspx

Answer 2

You can just use another Arabic language, the only difference between the two is the date format ...