Core Java™ 2 Volume II - Advanced Features, Seventh Edition

Number Formats

We already mentioned how number and currency formatting is highly locale dependent. The Java programming language supplies a collection of formatter objects that can format and parse numeric values in the java.text class. You go through the following steps to format a number for a particular locale.

1. Get the locale object, as described in the preceding section.

2. Use a “factory method” to obtain a formatter object.

3. Use the formatter object for formatting and parsing.

The factory methods are static methods of the NumberFormat class that take a Locale argument. There are three factory methods: getNumberInstance, getCurrencyInstance, and getPercentInstance. These methods return objects that can format and parse numbers, currency amounts, ...