python-dev

[Prev] Thread [Next]  |  [Prev] Date [Next]

Re: [Python-Dev] Formatting mini-language suggestion Raymond Hettinger Wed Mar 11 20:00:48 2009 


[James Y Knight]
You might be interested to know that in India, the commas don't come every 3 digits. In india, they come every two digits, after the first three. Thus one billion = 1,00,00,00,000. How are you gonna represent *that* in a formatting mini-language? :) 

It is not the goal to replace locale or to accomodate every
possible convention.  The goal is to make a common task easier
for many users. The current, default use of the period as a decimal point has not proven to be problem eventhough that convention is not universal. For a thousands separator, a comma is a decent choice that makes it easy follow-on with s.replace(',', '_') or somesuch. 

This simple utility could help a lot of programmers make their output
look more professional and readable.  I hope the idea doesn't get
sunk by a desire to over-parameterize and cover every possible use case.

My pocket calculators all support thousands separators but in Python,
we have to do a funky dance for even this most basic bit of formatting.

I'd like to think that in 2009 we could show a little progress beyond
C's printf() or Fortran's write() formats.


Raymond




import locale
locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, 'English_United States.1252')

'English_United States.1252'

conv = locale.localeconv()          # get a mapping of conventions
x = 1234567.8
locale.format("%d", x, grouping=True)

'1,234,567'

_______________________________________________
Python-Dev mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev
Unsubscribe: 
http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/alexiscircle%40gmail.com