Question

I have a input file coming into my application with some product prices values in each rows.

However, when the price is higher then 999.99, the values contain , at appropriate place.

1,000.00
5,432.89

etc.

1) Is there a set rule about placing comma in currency values ? On what basis the place of comma is decided ?

2) Is there a library method to parse such string values to float/double ?

Thanks for reading!!

Answer 1

You can use DecimalFormat to parse and format decimal numbers.

The commas are there for thousands separators. Here’s a simple example which deliberately parses to BigDecimal rather than to float or double – binary floating point is inappropriate for currency values.

import java.math.*;
import java.text.*;

public class Test {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        DecimalFormat format = new DecimalFormat();
        format.setParseBigDecimal(true);
        BigDecimal value = (BigDecimal) format.parse("1,234.56");
        System.out.println(value);
    }
}

Now that just uses the default locale for things like the thousands separator and the decimal separator – you may well want to specify a particular locale, if you know what will be used for the file you need to parse.