Question

Given the following code:

cout << 1000;

I would like the following output:

1,000

This can be done using std::locale, and the cout.imbue() function, but I fear I may be missing a step here. Can you spot it? I’m currently copying the current locale, and adding a thousands separator facet, but the comma never appears in my output.

template<typename T> class ThousandsSeparator : public numpunct<T> {
public:
    ThousandsSeparator(T Separator) : m_Separator(Separator) {}

protected:
    T do_thousands_sep() const  {
        return m_Separator;
    }

private:
    T m_Separator;
}

main() {
    cout.imbue(locale(cout.getloc(), new ThousandsSeparator<char>(',')));
    cout << 1000;
}

Answer 1

The default implementation of do_thousands_sep already returns ','. It looks like you should override do_grouping instead. do_grouping returns an empty string by default, which means no grouping. This means groups of three digits each:

string do_grouping() const
{
    return "\03";
}