localisation issues with DateTimeFormat.PredefinedFormat MONTH_ABBR

[claratee]

Hi,

Where can I report this? I think its a bug. It appears that the
strings returned for abbreviated month are wrong. I was wondering if
anyone else has come across this, whether its likely to be resolved in
another release, or if there is a good workaround.

We are preparing an application for German and UK markets, in which
there is a calendar that shows months. There is no space for the full
month name, so we are abbreviating them (MONTH_ABBR).

Most of the English month names are coming back with three letters,
although many months should be 4 (June, July, Sept). It still makes
sense, so we can forgive it...However, German seems to be a mess. Most
come back as three letters, some with "." at the end, and some
without. Unsure why, it does not tally with what was expected -
http://library.princeton.edu/departments/tsd/katmandu/reference/months.html
or http://lts.library.cornell.edu/lts/pp/spp/mosabbr#german

Thanks

[John A. Tamplin]

All of the data ultimately comes from Unicode CLDR.  For both English and German, the format string used for MONTH_ABBR is "LLL", which is the standalone abbreviated form of the month.  In English, all of the abbreviated names are 3 letters, as they should be.  For German, the standalone form of the month (to be used when it doesn't have a day and/or year in the format, depending on the locale) used to have the varying length and punctuation you describe, but has been updated in the current CLDR to all 3-letter abbreviations.

So, the updated German abbreviations will be picked up automatically when we next update the CLDR data included in GWT, which unfortunately will not be in time for the 2.4 release.