fromlocalestring

Why is there no fromLocaleString in JavaScript? I could really use it. In some locales, commas and periods have the opposite role, and trying to figure out which to use can be error-prone.

Should work in all modern browsers. With the help of https://github.com/es-shims/es5-shim, should even work in ie8 (internet explorer 8).

If you use number.toLocaleString(), you may get spaces (U+00a0), commas, periods, etc. as the thousands-separators, and a period, comma, etc. as the decimal-separator. If you want to convert back to a number, you have to figure out which separators to use. This library will figure out what those are by doing the conversion once, and detecting what characters were used.

Usage

From Node

This should change. It should live in an npm module. But it doesn't. Yet.

> var FromLocaleString = require('./fromlocalestring');
undefined
> var number = 1234;
undefined
> var txt = number.toLocaleString();
undefined
> txt
'1,234'
> var fromLocaleString = new FromLocaleString();
undefined
> fromLocaleString.number(txt);
1234
>

From a Browser

<script src="./fromlocalestring.js"></script>
<script>
var fromLocaleString = new FromLocaleString();
var number = 1234;
var txt = number.toLocaleString();
console.log(JSON.stringify(fromLocaleString.number(txt)));
</script>

... also gives you 1234.

Methods

.number

Convert using Number().

.parseFloat

Convert using parseFloat().

.parseInt

Convert using parseInt(). Using base as the second argument is supported. If you don't supply one, one is not passed to the native parseInt function.

Constants

Well, not really constants because not only are they initialized to whatever the current locale dictates, you can also change them at any time.

.separators.thousandsSeparator

Probably a comma, period, U+00a0, ...

.separators.decimalSeparator

Probably a period, comma, ...