Change current culture

Question

Heys guys,

at first: i am pretty new to the mighty world of powershell - second: my problem is that i want to change the current culture to edit an excel workbook.

The situation that led me to ask a new question about this topic (yes, i know that there are a lot of similar topic about "changing current culture" and "how to edit an excel workbook using powershell", dont worry) is that many answers (like this) are a good point to start - but it won't work for me!

So here's my actual problem: I got a script that says

function Set-Culture ([System.Globalization.CultureInfo] $culture)
{
    [System.Threading.Thread]::CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = $culture
    [System.Threading.Thread]::CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = $culture
}

Get-Culture
Set-Culture('en-us')
Get-Culture

And a result that says

LCID             Name             DisplayName                                                                                                      
----             ----             -----------                                                                                                      
3079             de-AT            German (Austria)                                                                                                 
3079             de-AT            German (Austria)

But (as you can see from above) wI ant to change the current culture to en-US. Where's my mistake?

Answer 1

If you are on PowerShell v2, it is MTA which means IIRC you can get a different thread for every pipeline invocation. V1, V3 and V4 are STA however, I believe PowerShell resets the culture at certain points in execution. I believe something like the following will work better:

function Using-Culture
{    
    param(
        [Globalization.CultureInfo]$culture = (throw "USAGE: Using-Culture -Culture culture -Script {scriptblock}"),
        [ScriptBlock]$script = (throw "USAGE: Using-Culture -Culture culture -Script {scriptblock}")
    )

    $OldCulture = [System.Threading.Thread]::CurrentThread.CurrentCulture
    $OldUICulture = [System.Threading.Thread]::CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture
    try {
        [System.Threading.Thread]::CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = $culture
        [System.Threading.Thread]::CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = $culture        
        Invoke-Command $script    
    }    
    finally {        
        [System.Threading.Thread]::CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = $OldCulture        
        [System.Threading.Thread]::CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = $OldUICulture    
    }    
}