Question

I am using DecimalFormat to create a formated decimal that is always 6 characters long. At first I used the format string of new DecimalFormat("000.00") but this gave me a bug for negative numbers. The minus sign is added and makes the number one space larger resulting in -005.25 and not -05.25 as desired.

I have been able to fix this with the following code

DecimalFormat fmt;  
if(netAmt < 0){  
    fmt = new DecimalFormat("00.00");  
}else{  
    fmt = new DecimalFormat("000.00");  
}  

System.out.println(fmt.format(netAmt));

But DecimalFormat has the ; character to format negative numbers differently then positive numbers. I have not been able to get this work correctly. As I understand it the following code should work just like the above.

DecimalFormat fmt = new DecimalFormat("000.00;00.00");  

System.out.println(fmt.format(netAmt));

The result is that the pattern before the ; is used for both negative and positive numbers causing the -005.25 error to remain. What am I doing wrong? Am I misunderstanding what ; is for?

Answer 1

Does the following string pattern help you: "%06.2f%n"
A fixed width of 6 with “0” padding the front?

example

System.out.println(String.format("%06.2f%n",1.3));
System.out.println(String.format("%06.2f%n",-3.323));

What do you want the behavior to be when the number is greater than 3 digits, ie won’t fit?