Assume you want to store the locale of user preference in database, which value you will use?
en_US or en-US
They are two standards, but which one you prefer to use as part of your own application?
Updated: Is seems many web sites use dash instead of underscore, e.g.
05 Answers
I'm pretty sure "-" is the standard. If you see "_" somewhere it's probably something some people came up with to make it a valid identifier.
Personally I'd go with "-", just to be correct.
6If you're working with Java, you might as well use the Java locale format (en_US).
The BCP 47 documents actually do specify the en-US format, and it's just as common if not more common than Java-style locale names. But in practice you'll see the form with the underbar quite a bit. For example, both Java and most POSIX-type platforms use the underbar for their language/region separator.
So you can't go far wrong with either choice. But given that you're writing in Java and probably targeting a Unix platform, en_US is probably the way to go.
In Java 7, there is a new method Locale.forLanguageTag(String), which assumes the hyphen as a separator. I'd consider that as normative.
Check the documentation of Locale for more information.
en_US. This is a very useful read.
10I don't think en-US is a standard at all for Java. (If you see it somewhere could you add a link).
So just use en_US.
