Are there cultures in which the decimal separator is longer than one character?

Question

I must write a stringToNumber parsing function that can use custom strings for the following:

• decimal separator (. for en-US => 3.1415)
• thousands separator (, for en-US => 1,000,000)
• positive sign (+ for en-US => +5)
• negative sign (- for en-US => -5)

Can I assume that these are only one character (which would make the implementation easier) or are there any cultures in which any of these are longer?

Lentissimo

By 'one character' are you referring to the '.', ',', '+' and '-'? And are you asking if these are ever repeated more than once in a number format? – Askins

I mean if these can be longer than one character. Like a culture in which you need to specify two dots to indicate the decimal separator. Like this for example: 10..00 – Embolectomy

You seem to be dealing specifically with the en-US culture. I've worked on a number of US, UK, Canadian, South African, etc. based projects and I've never seen any variation where more than one character is used. The only variation I can think of is '-' where in accounting '-5' might be presented as (5). – Askins

Answer 1

I wanted to know this as well, and found that I could do this:

foreach (CultureInfo ci in CultureInfo.GetCultures(CultureTypes.SpecificCultures))
{
    var sep = ci.NumberFormat.NumberDecimalSeparator;
    if (sep.Length > 1)
    {
        Console.WriteLine(ci.DisplayName);
        break;
    }
}

The results of this is that, no, there is no culture where the NumberDecimalSeparator is greater than 1 character in length. You can also experiment with CurrencyDecimalSeparator and find the same results. I suppose you can check all of them, which I didn't but that's up to you.

Hamitic