Question

hi I have a problem on formatted amounts.
On my input form, users can add and edit a formatted amount. Since this is a multi-language program, users can specify their own format, so there isn’t a fixed pattern.
Examples:

250.000
250,000
250.000,00  
250,000.00

Sadly, I have to “un-format” them, before store them into the database or MySQL will understand my number as floats and viceversa.

How can I overcome this? Any ideas?

Answer 1

ok, finally I made it, so I’ll share my solution
First of all, I used Mootools to format the input field while to user is typing.
Then I moved server side.

Format options are saved inside my application, so this is the code

//get decimal separator from saved params
$dec = $params->get('decimalSep', '.');
//remove any char that's not a number or decimal separator 
//(i don't care about thousands sep)
$regex = '#[^0-9-'.preg_quote($dec).']#';

$normalized = preg_replace($regex, '', $price);
$normalized = str_replace($dec, '.', $normalized);

Basically I get rid of everything except the decimal separator, then I replace it with the standard one (.).

It works like a charm.