title: How to get Locale from its String representation in Java?
body: <p>Is there a neat way of getting a <a href="http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/Locale.html" rel="noreferrer">Locale</a> instance from its "programmatic name" as returned by Locale's <code>toString()</code> method? An obvious and ugly solution would be parsing the String and then constructing a new Locale instance according to that, but maybe there's a better way / ready solution for that?</p>
  
  <p>The need is that I want to store some locale specific settings in a SQL database, including Locales themselves, but it would be ugly to put serialized Locale objects there. I would rather store their String representations, which seem to be quite adequate in detail.</p>