CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#csvlocale
Overly Excessive
Overly Excessive

Reputation: 2125

Formatting float with dot delimiter

I'm writing a csv converter to convert a text document of transactions into a csv document and I've run into a little problem.. 

    foreach (var transaction in transactions)
    {
        output.Append(
            string.Format("{0:dd/MM/yy},{1},{2},{3},{4:0.##},{5}", 
            transaction.Date, 
            transaction.Payee, 
            transaction.Category,
            transaction.Memo,
            transaction.Outflow,
            transaction.Inflow));
        output.AppendLine();
    }

This all works fine, the small issue I have is that the Outflow property is a float and my locale uses commas as the decimal delimiter, which is obviously quite a problem in a CSV so instead of getting let's say 10.50 it will output 10,50, is there any easy way to solve this?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 807

Answers (2)

Saeb Amini
Saeb Amini

Reputation: 24390

You can specify invariant culture which uses .:

foreach (var transaction in transactions)
{
    output.Append(
        string.Format("{0:dd/MM/yy},{1},{2},{3},{4},{5}", 
        transaction.Date, 
        transaction.Payee, 
        transaction.Category,
        transaction.Memo,
        transaction.Outflow.ToString("F2", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture),
        transaction.Inflow));
    output.AppendLine();
}

On a side-note, use decimal for money not float:

decimal is base 10 so it can represent fractional currency values like 0.1 exactly, float is base 2 and it can't. using float will result in strange rounding errors, and comparisons will not work as expected. Consider this:

float a = 3.6f, b = 0.1f, expected = 3.7f;
float sum = a + b;
Console.WriteLine(sum == expected); // false

This will output false because sum will actually be 3.69999981

You can read more on the subject from this C# in Depth excerpt.

Upvotes: 5

Moondustt
Moondustt

Reputation: 884

You can replace the , by . like this:

transaction.Outflow.ToString().Replace(',','.');

Upvotes: -2

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