Re: How to format a number with thousandth separators?

[Michael Abbott <mabster@...>]

On Wed, 2006-01-25 at 18:04 +0100, PA wrote:
> On Jan 25, 2006, at 09:40, Zakaria wrote:
> 
> > I'm a Lua newbie. What is the best way to do it?
> 
> Very brutal, there must be a better way :)
> 
> function self:formatNumber( aNumber, aLocale )
>          if aNumber ~= nil then
>                  local aString = tostring( math.floor( aNumber ) )
> 
>                  if aString:len() > 3 then
>                          aString = aString:reverse()
>                          aString = aString:gsub( "(%d%d%d)", "%1," )
>                          aString = aString:reverse()
> 
>                          if aString:sub( 1, 1 ) == "," then
>                                  aString = aString:sub( 2 )
>                          end
>                  end
> 
>                  return aString
>          end
> 
>          return nil
> end
> 
> Some alternatives:
> 
> http://www.bigbold.com/snippets/posts/show/693
> http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?NumericFormat

Very ugly!  Having originally come from South Africa, I shudder when I
see hard-coded separation like this.  In SA, we used the comma instead
of the period to display numbers (eg. 10,24 instead of 10.24).  I think
the most common thousand separation was 1 000,24 and I vaguely remember
seeing 1.000,24 a few times as well (I haven't lived there for some
time).  A quick search tells me that Switzerland does something similar
(and reverts to the common period notation for currency).

It'd be really nice to see a locale-aware method of doing this :-)

- Mab