Number & Currency formatting

CLDR defines many different ways to format a number for different uses and defines a set of formats categorised by common pupose to make it easier to express the same intent across many different locales that represent many different territories, cultures, number systems and scripts.

See Cldr.Number and Cldr.Number.to_string/2

Formatting Styles

Cldr supports the styles of formatting defined by CLDR being:

  • standard which formats a number if a decimal format commonly used in many locales.

  • currency which formats a number according to the format or a particular currency adjusted for rounding, number of decimal digits after the fraction, whether the currency is accounting or cash rounded and using the appropriate locale-specific currency symbol.

  • accounting which formats a positive number like standard but which usually wraps a negative number in ().

  • percent which multiplies a number by 100 and includes a locale-specific percent symbol. Usually %.

  • permille which multiples a number by 1,000 and includes a locale specific permille symbol. Usually .

  • scientific which formats a number as a mantissa and base-10 exponent.

See Cldr.Number.Formatter.Decimal

Short & Long Formats

Cldr also supports formats that minimise publishing space or which attempt to make large number more human-readable.

  • decimal_short which presents number is a narrow space. For example, 1,000 would be formatted as 1k.

  • decimal_long which presents numbers in a sentence form adjusted for plurality and locale. For example, 1,0000 would be formatted as 1 thousand. This is not the same as spelling out the number which is part of the Unicode CLDR Rules-Based Number Formatting. This capability is not yet available in Cldr

  • currency_short which formats a number in a manner similar to decimal_short but includes the symbol currency.

  • currency_long which formats a number in a manner similar to decimal_long but incudes the localised name of the current.

See Cldr.Number.Formatter.Short and Cldr.Number.Formatter.Currency.

User-Specified Decimal Formats

User-defined decimal formats are also supported using the formats described by Unicode technical report TR35.

The formats described therein are supported by Cldr with some minor omissions and variations. Some examples of number formats are:

PatternCurrencyText
#,##0.##n/a1 234,57
#,##0.###n/a1 234,567
###0.#####n/a1234,567
###0.0000#n/a1234,5670
00000.0000n/a01234,5670
00n/a12
#,##0.00 ¤EUR1 234,57 €

See Cldr.Number and Cldr.Number.Formatter.Decimal.