Name: joT67522 Date: 09/04/97


When using the format method of NdFormat to
determine the position of a field you
can only determine the position of one
field at a time. If you want to know
the positions of all the fields in the
format you are forced to call format multiple
times, once for each position. This can
be very expensive if the format contains
a large number of fields such as the
DateTime format.

A more efficient way would be to add a format
method which accepts an array of field positions
so more than one position can be
returned for a single call to format.


For example:

Date today = new Date();
DateFormat dateFmt = new SimpleDateFormat();
StringBuffer fmtBuf = new StringBuffer();

// Determine year position.
FieldPosition yearPos = new FieldPosition(DateFormat.YEAR_FIELD);
dateFmt.format(today, fmtBuf, yearPos);

fmtBuf.setLength(0); // Clear

// Determine month position.
FieldPosition monthPos = new FieldPosition(DateFormat.MONTH_FIELD);
dateFmt.format(today, fmtBuf, monthPos);

// And so on for each field position...


company - Neuron Data , email - holland@neurondata
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