Question

I have an issue with the submitted form information. Decimal parsing fails when I try to parse a string returned through Interner Explorer or Chrome but not on Firefox or Safari. The strings looks exactly the same in Visual Studio. I made this debugging bit:

var asd3 = collection["formValue"]; // Get it from the FormCollection
var asd4 = asd3.Replace(",", ".");  // Change the punctuation
var asd5 = Decimal.Parse(asd4);     // Make the string into a decimal
var asd6 = Math.Round(asd5, 1);     // Round it

It fails on asd5 when trying to parse the decimal out of asd4 with the error: Input string was not in a correct format.

Here’s an image of the strings. Top is Firefox and below Internet Explorer.

What on earth could be the problem here?

Answer 1

What on earth could be the problem here?

Culture.

In your debugger inspect the value of Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture and you will see differences between your browsers.

If you have a different culture set in your browser this culture will be used by ASP.NET when parsing values especially if you haven’t explicitly specified the culture in your web.config:

<globalization culture="en-US" uiCulture="en-US" />

If this is set to auto then the browser culture will be used.

Another possibility is to force invariant culture when parsing to ensure that . (dot) will be the decimal separator.

var asd5 = Decimal.Parse(asd4, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);