Intl.NumberFormat

By  on  

Formatting numbers on the client side is an important task, especially when you consider how much raw API usage is in play these days. What's also important is ensuring those numbers are meaningful to users, no matter where they are in the world, especially if you're an eCommerce website.

Writing internationalization code can be a nightmare but luckily JavaScript provides us Intl.NumberFormat, an API for internationalizing numbers as currencies and more. Let's check it out!

Some examples of Intl.NumberFormat include:

new Intl.NumberFormat().format(12345)
// 12,345

new Intl.NumberFormat('en-US', { maximumSignificantDigits: 4}).format(1.2345678)
// 1.235 (Notice the rounding)

new Intl.NumberFormat('en-GB', { style: 'currency', currency: 'GBP' }).format(9002.20)
// £9,002.20

new Intl.NumberFormat('de-DE', { style: 'currency', currency: 'EUR' }).format(9002.20)
// 9.002,20 €

new Intl.NumberFormat().formatToParts(12345.678)
/*
[
   { "type":"integer", "value":"12" },
   { "type":"group", "value":"," },
   { "type":"integer", "value":"345" },
   { "type":"decimal", "value":"." },
   { "type":"fraction", "value":"678" }
]
*/

Don't bother writing your own client side number formatting functions if the numbers you want to present are standard formats -- leverage the amazing APIs the browser provides you!

Recent Features

  • By
    Designing for Simplicity

    Before we get started, it's worth me spending a brief moment introducing myself to you. My name is Mark (or @integralist if Twitter happens to be your communication tool of choice) and I currently work for BBC News in London England as a principal engineer/tech...

  • By
    7 Essential JavaScript Functions

    I remember the early days of JavaScript where you needed a simple function for just about everything because the browser vendors implemented features differently, and not just edge features, basic features, like addEventListener and attachEvent.  Times have changed but there are still a few functions each developer should...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Translate Content with the Google Translate API and JavaScript

    Note:  For this tutorial, I'm using version1 of the Google Translate API.  A newer REST-based version is available. In an ideal world, all websites would have a feature that allowed the user to translate a website into their native language (or even more ideally, translation would be...

  • By
    Retrieve Google Analytics Visits and PageViews with PHP

    Google Analytics is an outstanding website analytics tool that gives you way more information about your website than you probably need. Better to get more than you want than not enough, right? Anyways I check my website statistics more often than I should and...

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!