Watch out for Locales when using NumberFormat with currencies
In Java you have the NumberFormatException to help you formatting and parsing numbers for any locale. Said that, here’s some code.
BigDecimal negative = new BigDecimal("-1234.56");
DecimalFormat nf = (DecimalFormat) NumberFormat.getCurrencyInstance(Locale.UK);
String formattedNegative = nf.format(negative);
System.out.println(formattedNegative);
The output for this code is -£1,234.56. That’s expected, as the locale is set to UK, so the currency symbol used is for British Pounds. And as the number is negative, you get that minus sign as a prefix. For Japanese locale you’d get -￥1,235, and for Brazilian locale you’d get -R$ 1.234,56.
So far so good.
What about the following code, with nothing different except for the locale set to US.
BigDecimal negative = new BigDecimal("-1234.56");
DecimalFormat nf = (DecimalFormat) NumberFormat.getCurrencyInstance(Locale.US); // <--- US now
String formattedNegative = nf.format(negative);
System.out.println(formattedNegative);
Some could intuitively expect -$1,234.56. However, the output is actually ($1,234.56).
There are different prefixes and suffixes. But in some locales the prefix can be empty, or, as in the case of the US locale, it can be quite different than what you could expect.
Learned about this peculiarity from NumberFormat while working on VALIDATOR-433 for Apache Commons Validator.
Happy hacking!
Categories: Blog