IFormatProvider Interface
Summary
Defines a mechanism that returns an object that customizes formatting or parsing of the current natural language or cultural information.
Inheritance
Members
Methods
Remarks
The IFormatProvider interface is implemented by classes that supply culture-specific formatting information. For example, DateTimeFormatInfo and NumberFormatInfo are culture-specific classes that implement IFormatProvider and provide formatting information for dates, times, and numbers.
Many methods in the .NET Framework that format or parse data, such as the overloads of ToString() and Parse(), accept an IFormatProvider object as a parameter. This allows you to specify how the data should be formatted or parsed according to the conventions of a particular culture.
If you do not specify an IFormatProvider, the current culture's formatting information is used. This can lead to unexpected results if your application is deployed to computers with different regional settings.
To obtain an IFormatProvider for a specific culture, you can use the static properties of the CultureInfo class (e.g., CultureInfo.InvariantCulture, CultureInfo.CurrentCulture) or create a new CultureInfo object (e.g., new CultureInfo("fr-FR")).