What I'm trying to say is that any attempt to select a currency format based on the language choice of the user is misguided. Ivan Sergio Borgonovo wrote:
Forget about currency. Currency is completely unrelated to the user's language, and it certainly shouldn't change, just because a user changes their language.
Well you can express amounts in dollars, euros, yuan with different formats as you express floats.
Sure you /can/ do anything, but you're doing a disservice to the community if you introduce a flawed feature that well-meaning people might start using!
French people may expect something like: 1.234?56 the - sign can take different places: - $ 1.234,56 $ -1.234,56 etc...
How do you tell the French...
an American may expect to read ? 1,234,56
... from the American? Let's try a concrete example. We have, let's say $0.02 Now, the user changes his language to French. Apparently, you're jumping to the conclusion that he must be a member of the "French people" -- that's wrong more that two thirds of the time, but if we leave that aside for the moment, what do you propose to do with those two cents now? Consider the same scenario in Canada -- what do you propose to do? Let's try another example: A Swiss website (default language: German) sells something in Swiss Francs and Euros, and a price tag might look like CHF 1'700.70 EUR 1.000,50 Now the user changes his language to a) French or b) Japanese (hint: Yen amounts have no fractional part). What do you propose to do? I've never actually seen a website that uses two different number formats -- so maybe try this instead: CHF 1 700.70 EUR 1 000.50
In *many circumstances* people won't tolerate that numbers/currencies don't get displayed in their local format.
Quite the contrary is true. People are well aware that every website is located in some specific country, and they expect currency formats to follow the customs of that country, no matter what language they select. A website should never try to impersonate a foreign nationality, especially when it deals with monetary amounts. BTW, as to "won't tolerate" -- how many people (besides yourself) do you know who won't buy something, just because the website formats the price tag differently than their local grocery store? Hans P.S. Apparently, the message digest script munges your currency symbols and I'm only seeing question marks, so describing in words would help...