European and US formatted currency

I've just been trying to help out some guys and gals over on the CF Adobe forums (I try and give something back occasionally). Here's a question that I've just answered:

I have a question I need to convert a European number (. as thousand separator and a , as decimal separator) to an American number. But I could receive both type of numbers. So when I get an American number delivered I want to do nothing and in case of an European number I want to convert it.

When I have a number say 123.456.789,01 I want to transfer it to 123,456,789.01

I wrote a little function to handle converting European and US formatted currency to a decimal, but I'm sure there is a neater (pure CF) solution. Anyway here is what I came up with:

<cfscript>
function ConvertToNumber(s) {
  var parsed = ListChangeDelims( arguments.s, ".", ",.'" );
  var integer = "";
  var decimal = "";
  if (ListLen( parsed, "." ) gt 1) {
    integer = Replace( Left( parsed, parsed.lastIndexOf(".") ), ".", "", "all" );
    decimal = ListLast( parsed, "." );
    return integer & "." & decimal;
  }
  else {
    return parsed;
  }
}
</cfscript>

<cfoutput>
ConvertToNumber("123.456.789,01") = #ConvertToNumber("123.456.789,01")#<br />
ConvertToNumber("123,456,789.01") = #ConvertToNumber("123,456,789.01")#<br />
ConvertToNumber("123,45") = #ConvertToNumber("123,45")#<br />
ConvertToNumber("123.45") = #ConvertToNumber("123.45")#<br />
ConvertToNumber("123456789") = #ConvertToNumber("123456789")#<br />
</cfoutput>

Feel free to put me to shame :)

• Posted in:
• ColdFusion

3 comments

1. what the heck is "European formatted currency"? there's no currency symbol involved & for sure there are locale numeric formats that use other delimiters besides commas & decimal points.
   
   Comment by PaulH – October 20, 2008
2. Why not to use LSNumberFormat?
   
   I think numbers should be saved always without any dot or comma and formatted while displaying with required local settings.
   
   Comment by Oğuz Demirkap? – October 21, 2008
3. @PaulH and @Oğuz.
   
   I don't know where the value was coming from but I guess it is a form value. Totally agree that you should store as a straight decimal. I think the guy was trying to convert to a decimal so that he could save it in a database or format it with the inbuilt CF functions. My function just works out what is being used as the decimal point and strips out the thousand seperators.
   
   @PaulH, here is an example of what I think he means by "European formatted currency":
   www.achetezfacile.com/canon-eos-1d-mark-iii-comparer-les-prix-177747.html?gclid=CJjAsoHut5YCFQWc1AodIirWLQ
   
   Comment by John Whish – October 21, 2008