Recently I came across the need to format Decimal as Currency, but force it down to Indian/Vedic/South Asian numeric formatting (thousands, lacs, crores etc.) instead of the standard Arabic/Metric system (thousands, hundred thousands, million, billion etc.).

The answer was easily found in this StackOverflow thread. The code snippet is reproduced here:

string fare = "123000.0000";
decimal parsed = decimal.Parse(fare,
CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);
CultureInfo hindi = new CultureInfo("hi-IN");
string text = string.Format(hindi, "{0:c}", parsed);

The above code gives us the following string

₹ 1,23,000.00

However, the next requirement was to keep the decimals and formatting but remove the Currency symbol. Another quick search gave us this little gem from Jon Skeet on StackOverflow. Essentially he extracted the NumberFormatInfo from the CultureInfo and reset the Currency Symbol to an empty string. Then use the NumberFormatInfo instance to format the decimal value. So the above code can be modified as follows:

string fare = "123000.0000";
decimal parsed = decimal.Parse(fare,
    CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);
CultureInfo hindi = new CultureInfo("hi-IN");
NumberFormatInfo hindiNFO =
    (NumberFormatInfo)hindi.NumberFormat.Clone();
hindiNFO.CurrencySymbol = string.Empty;
string text = string.Format(hindiNFO, "{0:c}", parsed);

This gives us the following string. It’s difficult to see here but there is a leading space that you might want to trim if you need to.

1,23,000.00

A Sample Application

I thought it would be a fun project to write some code that gives you the above code for any Culture Code you want, so I setup a basic ASP.NET project and deployed it for free on the AzureWebsites. You can see it in action here – Currency Formatter on Azure WebSites

• I spun up Visual Studio 2013 and setup a default MVC project.
• Next I updated KnockoutJS to the latest version

PM> update-package KnockoutJS

• Added an Entity to encapsulate the culture information. I referred to this list on MSDN as my source.

public class IsoCultureInfo {     public int Id { get; set; }     public string LanguageCultureName { get; set; }     public string DisplayName { get; set; }     public string CultureCode { get; set; }     public string ISO639xValue { get; set; } }

• Scaffolded up an EntityFramwork controller: CultureInfoController
• Added two methods to the CultureInfoController that return JsonResults
• The first one simply returns the entire list of IsoCultureInfo objects in the DB

public JsonResult List()
{
    return Json(db.IsoCultureInfoes.ToList(), JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet);
}

• The second one formats the predefined text based on the incoming Culture Name and returns the formatted text as a JSON object.

public JsonResult FormattedText(string id) {      try      {          string fare = "123000.0000";          decimal parsed = decimal.Parse(fare, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);          CultureInfo cultureInfo = new CultureInfo(id);          NumberFormatInfo cultureNFO = (NumberFormatInfo) cultureInfo.NumberFormat.Clone();          //cultureNFO.CurrencySymbol = string.Empty;          string text = string.Format(cultureNFO, "{0:c}", parsed);          return Json(new { formattedCurrency = text });       }       catch (Exception ex)       {           return Json(new { formattedCurrency = "N/A" });       } }

• Both these methods are invoked from the Index HTML. The UI is databound to a Knockout ViewModel. This is defined in the script formatCurrency.js

/// <reference path="_references.js" />

var isoCultureInfo = {
    LanguageCultureName : ko.observable("")
};

var viewModel = {
    dataList: ko.observableArray([]),
    formattedString: ko.observable("Test"),
    selectedCulture: ko.observable(isoCultureInfo)
};

$(document).ready(function () {
    $.ajax("/CultureInfo/List",
        {
            type: "GET",
            contentType: "text/json"
        }).done(function (data) {
            viewModel.dataList = ko.mapping.fromJS(data);
            ko.applyBindings(viewModel);

viewModel.selectedCulture.subscribe(function(newValue){
                if (newValue.LanguageCultureName() != '') {
                    var data = { "id": newValue.LanguageCultureName() };
                    $.ajax("/CultureInfo/FormattedText",
                        {
                            type: "POST",
                            contentType: "application/json",
                            data: JSON.stringify(data)
                        }).done(function (data) {
                            viewModel.formattedString(data.formattedCurrency);
                        }).error(function (args) {
                            alert("");
                        });;
                };
            });
        }).error(function () {

});
});

• Finally I updated the Index.cshtml of the Home Controller to show the dropdown with the list of culture info.

Select Culture: <select id="cultureOptions"                                 class="form-control"                                 data-bind="options: dataList(), optionsText: 'LanguageCultureName', value: selectedCulture, optionsCaption: 'Choose...'"></select>

• Added a
  to show all the property values of the selected Culture

  `

  
     
  • Language Culture Name:
  
     
  • Display Name:
  
     
  • Culture Code:
  
     
  • ISO 639x Value:

  `
  • Next we have a

     section which contains the code that changes as per the selected Culture.

    
  string fare = "123000.0000";  
  decimal parsed = decimal.Parse(fare, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);  
  CultureInfo cultureInfo = new CultureInfo();  
  NumberFormatInfo cultureNFO = (NumberFormatInfo)cultureInfo.NumberFormat.Clone();  
  // If you don't want the CurrencySymbol, uncomment the following line  
  // cultureNFO.CurrencySymbol = string.Empty;  
  string text = string.Format(cultureNFO, "{0:c}", parsed);  
  

  • Finally we have a span to show the formatted string returned after we have selected the Culture Info

  Formatted String: <b><span data-bind="text: $parent.formattedString"></span></b>

  Conclusion

  The code snippet changes as you select the Culture Info in the dropdown and you can copy paste it directly. I deployed it on a free Azure Website, how? That’s for another day .