Question

Hi I’d like know how to format BigDecimal representing numbers,percents,moneys,integers to String in Locales and from String back to BigDecimal. I’m using DecimalFormat which is powerful, but I’m not sure how to use conversion to exact type in default user locales. I first time use this:

DecimalFormat.getCurrencyInstance().format( obj );
DecimalFormat.getCurrencyInstance().parse( source );

But with large numbers its misrepresents their value. So i find something and get this:

DecimalFormat decimalFormat = new DecimalFormat();
decimalFormat.setParseBigDecimal( true );
BigDecimal bd = ( BigDecimal ) decimalFormat.parse( value );

But how to combine these thinks. I probably need set to DecimalFormat some pattern which is used in NumberFormat.get???instance(), but I don’t know how and if isn’t get some strange behavior.

So Please someone who has experience with this can you help me? Thanks Pavel

Answer 1

I think your best bet is to assume that getCurrencyInstace() returns a DecimalFormat, which it probably does in all of the “important” locales. To be safe you could employ instanceof:

public static BigDecimal parseCurrencyPrecise (String value)
{
    NumberFormat  format = NumberFormat.getCurrencyInstance ();
    if (format instanceof DecimalFormat)
        ((DecimalFormat) format).setParseBigDecimal (true);

    Number  result = format.parse (value);
    if (result instanceof BigDecimal)
        return (BigDecimal) result;
    else {
        // Oh well...
        return new BigDecimal (result.doubleValue ());
    }
}

In our application we basically do the same for something different where you’d need SimpleDateFormat, but only have DateFormat in general case.