Given the following code

LocalDate localDateEpoch = LocalDate.parse(
        "01-Jan-2017", DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("d-MMM-yyyy", Locale.FRENCH));

System.out.println("localDateEpoch: " + localDateEpoch);

The reason why i picked french is – French numbers are latin so in theory it should just interpret this (Same with the letters in “Jan”). Nevertheless i got this error

Exception in thread "main" java.time.format.DateTimeParseException: 
                             Text '01-Jan-2017' could not be parsed at index 3

My questions

• First: (Locale related) What’s up with the lack of countries/languages? They are very limited
• 2nd: (Locale related) Why are there locales for languages/countries (like French and France)?
• 3rd: What does this even do?

Now i’ve done a bit of research on my end.
Seems to resolve the lack of languages issues mentioned above you could just do Locale.forLanguageTag("fa"); but again why not have Locale.Iran/Persian. Saw a post mentioning about how to convert numerical values to Persian in this case, so i tried to do the opposite.

    LocalDate localDateEpoch = LocalDate.parse(
        "۰۱-Jan-۲۰۱۷", DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("d-MMM-yyyy", Locale.forLanguageTag("fa")));

And again i got an error.

Exception in thread "main" java.time.format.DateTimeParseException: 
                             Text '۰۱-Jan-۲۰۱۷' could not be parsed at index 0

Also just if your curious i tried it without MMM and still got the same error.