locale - Arabic number in Arabic text in Android

Question

EDIT

I'm porting my app to Arabic locale. I have some getString() with parameters like:

getString(R.string.distance, distance)

where <string name="distance">%1d km</string>

The requirement is that in Arabic I should show it like this: "2.3 ??".

If I set as the locale for Saudi Arabia (country = "sa") or UAE (country = "ae") the number are shown in Eastern-Arabic but my client wants them in Western-Arabic.

The solution here is to use Egypt as a country in the locale but this is not possible for me.

I tried:

@TargetApi(Build.VERSION_CODES.LOLLIPOP)
public void setAppContextLocale(Locale savedLocale) {
    Locale.Builder builder = new Locale.Builder();
    builder.setLocale(savedLocale).setExtension(Locale.UNICODE_LOCALE_EXTENSION, "nu-latn");
    Locale locale = builder.build();
    Configuration config = new Configuration();
    config.locale = locale;
    config.setLayoutDirection(new Locale(savedLocale.getLanguage()));
    mAppContext.getResources().updateConfiguration(config, mContext.getResources().getDisplayMetrics());
}

as suggested in this question but after that the country is ignored so both SA and AE locales use the strings in the default file.

Answer 1

There's such issue in Google's bugtracker: Arabic numerals in arabic language intead of Hindu-Arabic numeral system

If particularly Egypt locale doesn't work due to some customer's issue(I can understand it), then you can format your string to any other western locales. For example:

 NumberFormat nf = NumberFormat.getInstance(new Locale("en","US")); //or "nb","No" - for Norway
 String sDistance = nf.format(distance);
 distanceTextView.setText(String.format(getString(R.string.distance), sDistance));

If solution with new Locale doesn't work at all, there's an ugly workaround:

public String replaceArabicNumbers(String original) {
    return original.replaceAll("?","1")
                    .replaceAll("?","2")
                    .replaceAll("?","3")
                    .....;
}

(and variations around it with Unicodes matching (U+0661,U+0662,...). See more similar ideas here)

Upd1: To avoid calling formatting strings one by one everywhere, I'd suggest to create a tiny Tool method:

public final class Tools {

    static NumberFormat numberFormat = NumberFormat.getInstance(new Locale("en","US"));

    public static String getString(Resources resources, int stringId, Object... formatArgs) {
        if (formatArgs == null || formatArgs.length == 0) {
            return resources.getString(stringId, formatArgs);
        }

        Object[] formattedArgs = new Object[formatArgs.length];
        for (int i = 0; i < formatArgs.length; i++) {
            formattedArgs[i] = (formatArgs[i] instanceof Number) ?
                                  numberFormat.format(formatArgs[i]) :
                                  formatArgs[i];
        }
        return resources.getString(stringId, formattedArgs);
    }
}

....

distanceText.setText(Tools.getString(getResources(), R.string.distance, 24));

Or to override the default TextView and handle it in setText(CharSequence text, BufferType type)

public class TextViewWithArabicDigits extends TextView {
    public TextViewWithArabicDigits(Context context) {
        super(context);
    }

    public TextViewWithArabicDigits(Context context, AttributeSet attrs) {
        super(context, attrs);
    }

    @Override
    public void setText(CharSequence text, BufferType type) {
        super.setText(replaceArabicNumbers(text), type);
    }

    private String replaceArabicNumbers(CharSequence original) {
        if (original != null) {
            return original.toString().replaceAll("?","1")
                    .replaceAll("?","2")
                    .replaceAll("?","3")
                    ....;
        }

        return null;
    }
}

I hope, it helps