[Python-ideas] Format mini-language for lakh and crore

[Nick Coghlan]

On 28 January 2018 at 19:30, Stephan Houben <stephanh42 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi David,
>
> Perhaps the "n" locale-dependent number formatting specifier
> should accept a , to have locale-appropriate formatting of thousand
> separators?
>
> f"{x:,n}"
>
> would Do The Right Thing(TM) depending on the locale.

Checking https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0378/, we did suggest
using the locale module for cases where the engineering style
groups-of-three structure wasn't appropriate, with the parallel being
drawn to the fact that you also need to use locale dependent
formatting to get a decimal separator other than ".".

One nice aspect of this suggestion is that supplying the comma would
map directly to the "grouping" parameter in
https://docs.python.org/3/library/locale.html#locale.format:

    >>> import locale
    >>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, "en_IN.utf8")
    'en_IN.utf8'
    >>> locale.format("%d", 10e9, grouping=True)
    '10,00,00,00,000'

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia