Question

I have a small tab on an app that allows user to lookup a price in a price table and it returns the price. how can i get the ‘$’ sign on the returned price?

public double? SearchMedicinePrice(Int64 pNDC)
{
    double? retValue = null;
    objConext = new FDBEntities();
    Medicine objMedicine = objConext.Medicines.Where(med => med.PriceType == 9 && med.NDC == pNDC).OrderByDescending(item=>item.MedicineID).FirstOrDefault();
    if (objMedicine != null)
    {
        retValue = objMedicine.Price;
    }
    return retValue;
}

Answer 1

When you call ToString() on a double (and many other types), you can pass in a format string to specify how the result should be formatted. Like this:

double price = 10.5;
price.ToString("C");

Output = $10.50

You could also use String.Format like this:

string message = String.Format("The price is {0:C}", SearchMedicinePrice(pndc));

{0:C} is a format string. The C specifies that the value should be formatted as currency.

You can also pass in a CultureInfo object to configure things like the currency symbol. For example, the following code will output £10.50

10.5.ToString("C", new CultureInfo("en-GB"))

You might also consider using decimal instead of double for storing currency data.