Popular:
 Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

How to Internationalize Numbers with JavaScript

By  on  

Presenting numbers in a readable format takes many forms, from visual charts to simply adding punctuation. Those punctuation, however, are different based on internationalization. Some countries use , for decimal, while others use .. Worried about having to code for all this madness? Don't -- JavaScript provides a method do the hard work for you!

The Number primitive has a toLocaleString method to do the basic formatting for you:

const price = 16601.91;

// Basic decimal format, no providing locale
// Uses locale provided by browser since none defined
price.toLocaleString(); // "16,601.91"

// Provide a specific locale
price.toLocaleString('de-DE'); // "16.601,91"

// Formatting currency is possible
price.toLocaleString('de-DE', { 
  style: 'currency', 
  currency: 'EUR' 
}); // "16.601,91 €"

// You can also use Intl.NumberFormat for formatting
new Intl.NumberFormat('en-US', {
  style: 'currency',
  currency: 'GBP'
}).format(price); // £16,601.91

It's a major relief that JavaScript provides us these type of helpers so that we don't need to rely on bloated third-party libraries. No excuses -- the tool is there!

Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring

Recent Features

  • By
    Camera and Video Control with HTML5

    Client-side APIs on mobile and desktop devices are quickly providing the same APIs.  Of course our mobile devices got access to some of these APIs first, but those APIs are slowly making their way to the desktop.  One of those APIs is the getUserMedia API...

  • By
    CSS @supports

    Feature detection via JavaScript is a client side best practice and for all the right reasons, but unfortunately that same functionality hasn't been available within CSS.  What we end up doing is repeating the same properties multiple times with each browser prefix.  Yuck.  Another thing we...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    MooTools OpenLinks Class – Updated

    A long time back I coded a MooTools class called OpenLinks. The class is quite useful but the code...sucks. I've gotten much better with MooTools over the past years so I thought I'd go back and update the class to be better, faster...

  • By
    CSS Columns

    One major gripe that we've always had about CSS is that creating layouts seems to be more difficult than it should be. We have, of course, adapted and mastered the techniques for creating layouts, but there's no shaking the feeling that there should be a...

Discussion

  1. dashingarts

    Simple usage without specifying a locale returns a formatted string in the default locale and with default options.

    const number = 3500;

console.log(new Intl.NumberFormat().format(number));
// '3,500' if in US English locale

    See more options with dashingarts.

  2. Vishnu

    Is there any difference in the formatting between 

    toLocaleString

    and format using 

    new Intl.NumberFormat(...)

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