Numeric formatting question

[PIEBALDconsult]

Will this suit the need? :-D

System.Console.WriteLine ( "{0,1: + ; - }{0,7 : 0 ; 0 }" , 2009 ) ;
System.Console.WriteLine ( "{0,1: + ; - }{0,7 : 0 ; 0 }" , -2009 ) ;

(SPACEs added to avoid smileys; remove them.) (Third try.)

modified on Friday, February 27, 2009 1:55 PM

[bscaer]

Yes, that is brilliant! Thank you :cool:

[led mike]

bscaer wrote:

Thanks for the link.

That was a bad link, sorry. Standard number formats[^] Custome format strings[^]

bscaer wrote:

but it seems to be incomplete

Not the documentation. Sometimes all the information you need is not on a single page but there are links to the additional pages. Perhaps the formatting support does not provide for your specific goal. If that is the case then you will have to provide your own implementation.

[Dan Neely]

similes avoided spaces. :doh:

Today's lesson is brought to you by the word "niggardly". Remember kids, don't attribute to racism what can be explained by Scandinavian language roots. -- Robert Royall

[PIEBALDconsult]

Alas. :sigh:

[PIEBALDconsult]

I don't think she would have gotten as far as she did without having read the documentation; I know I wouldn't have.

[Ennis Ray Lynch Jr]

The best thing to do in this scenario is to create your own customer formatter and then pass it in as an argument. String.Format(formatProvider, formatString, arguments). I have found this to be the only good way when dealing with phone numbers which may have bad data and I am sure it will provide you with that you need. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.iformatprovider.aspx[^]

Need custom software developed? I do C# development and consulting all over the United States. A man said to the universe: "Sir I exist!" "However," replied the universe, "The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation." --Stephen Crane

[PIEBALDconsult]

Glad to be of service. I was also just looking for a solution using my ApplyFormat[^] method, but no joy. I had hoped that this would do it:

System.Console.WriteLine ( 2009.ApplyFormat ( "' '+;-''#####0;#####0" ) ) ;
System.Console.WriteLine ( (-2009).ApplyFormat ( "' '+;-''#####0;#####0" ) ) ;

Apparently the number sign (#) format character doesn't perform padding. :mad: (Apparently its only purpose is to result in an empty string when the value is zero. Yeah, like that's useful. :rolleyes: ) I guess that means I can add more functionality to my method to support it. Yippee, something to do.

[Luc Pattyn]

PIEBALDconsult wrote:

SPACEs added to avoid smileys; remove them.

Whenever 4 or more spaces are present use t:)a:)b:)s

Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [My Articles]

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modified on Sunday, June 12, 2011 8:46 AM

[PIEBALDconsult]

I didn't want any SPACEs in the format at all.

[bscaer]

From my experimentation it seems like the number sign (#) is only useful when specifying the location of a special character, like a comma, such as in String.Format("0:###,###,###").

[PIEBALDconsult]

Ah, that too. Darn, there needs to be another option, like '9' to specify left-padding. I've forgotten everything I learned about COBOL, so I forget how this was handled in it.

[PIEBALDconsult]

It just might come to that. :sigh:

[Luc Pattyn]

PIEBALDconsult wrote:

I've forgotten everything I learned about COBOL, so I forget how this was handled in it.

You can fix that easily by following some links at the bottom[^]. :)

Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [My Articles]

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- before you ask a question here, search CodeProject, then Google - the quality and detail of your question reflects on the effectiveness of the help you are likely to get - use the code block button (PRE tags) to preserve formatting when showing multi-line code snippets

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[PIEBALDconsult]

I already did some searching; I now know almost as much about COBOL as I used to. :-D

[Dan Neely]

IIRC it also lets you pad to the right of a decimal. Unfortunately I don't know how to pad to the left.

Today's lesson is brought to you by the word "niggardly". Remember kids, don't attribute to racism what can be explained by Scandinavian language roots. -- Robert Royall

[PIEBALDconsult]

I appears that the formats themselves don't pad (other than with zeroes), that padding is handled by the WriteLine, string.Format, etc. that calls it. I assume that the creators of the formatters decided that if the caller was going to do the padding, then they didn't need to. Which makes sense, but there are cases when the caller isn't going to do the padding so the formatter should be able to. Because my ApplyFormat method is a caller of formatting, I now have to decide how best to allow the user to specify padding. I'm thinking I should follow Microsoft's lead and allow the format to be prefixed with "n:" to specify a minimum width of n characters.

[PIEBALDconsult]

I have added padding support to my ApplyFormat method, so now 2009.ApplyFormat ( "' '+;-''6 : 0 ;0" ) will do that. But now I want to cache the interpretation of the format specifier to streamline things a bit, so I'm not yet ready to update the article.

modified on Saturday, February 28, 2009 6:26 PM

[bscaer]

The original code was mangled because of fixes required for smileys. Here is the correct code:

System.Console.WriteLine ( "{0 , 1 : + ; -}{0 , 7 : -O ; 0}" , 2009 ) ;
System.Console.WriteLine ( "{0 , 1 : + ; -}{0 , 7 : -O ; 0}" , -2009 ) ;

[PIEBALDconsult]

What I posted works fine for me (once the SPACEs are removed).