dojo.number

Status:Draft
Version:1.2

Introduction

dojo.number contains methods for user presentation of Javascript Number objects: formatting, parsing, and rounding.

Formatting and parsing are done in a locale-sensitive manner, using culturally appropriate patterns for representing group (thousands) and decimal separators, percent signs, etc. This module forms the basis of dojo.currency, which uses similar methods but adds support for currency symbols and alters the pattern as appropriate.

format()/parse()

Similar to dojo.date.locale, dojo.number uses the Unicode.org Common Locale Data Repository in dojo.cldr to look up culturally-sensitive data to interact with users. An American user would expect the number one-million to two decimal places to be represented as “1,000,000.00”. A German user would expect to see “1.000.000,00” and a French user would expect to see “1 000 000,00”. In India, there are thousands separators and hundreds place separators beyond that, so the appropriate formatted string would read “10,00,000.00”. Simply calling dojo.number.format(1000000, {places:2}) will give the correct results for the locale set by djConfig. The inverse operation, dojo.number.parse(“1,000,000.00”, {places:2}) will yield the Javascript Number 1000000.

Custom formats may be specified to override the localized convention by passing in a ‘pattern’, for example dojo.number.format(123, {pattern:”00000”}) gives a result of “00123”. The pattern string is constructed according to the Unicode CLDR specification, which uses a convention similar to Java’s NumberFormat. See the API docs for details.

round()

The rounding method attempts to overcome some of the shortcomings of the intrinsic Javascript rounding methods, Math.round and Number.toFixed, allowing arbitrary increments in rounding to any number of places, and making adjustments for browser quirks. dojo.number.round works around a bug in Internet Explorer with Number.toFixed()

IE: (0.9).toFixed(1) yields “0.0” All other browsers: (0.9).toFixed(1) yields “1.0”

See Also

  • dojo.currency

TODO: add references to CLDR, setting locale in Dojo, binary floating point issues

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