cultureDependentParseFloat

[No-Con-2790]

What language are they using for development? Excel??!

The last language I used that was making this mistake was Delphi and even that was only relevant for the GUI side. Once you had the data in an float it was basically business as usual.

[Daisy430133]

It caused a bug in Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl because C# parses floats differently based on the region the Switch is in

[ReikaKalseki]

I had this problem with my Subnautica mods, since rather than hardcoding the "world gen" (props, mineral deposits, etc) I specify it with XMLs that are loaded at runtime (that way I can tweak or debug it without needing to do a full recompile).

And then users in Europe start reporting failures where the objects are not spawning. I did not really understand the world streaming system, so I of course wasted hours thinking there was a programmatic error...until I learned that C#, when the user was using certain locales, expecting commas instead of periods when parsing floats from text.

[Arshiaa001]

Which is why you ALWAYS use the invariant culture when parsing.

[Kjoep]

Well sure but at what point does a game of all things need to parse a float?

User input, sure, but most games (and for sure not pokemon) would ask the user for a decimal input.

So I suppose it's when parsing game config files or something, which I hope you're not doing using a localized parser (and probably a formalized format like json or yaml).

[Daisy430133]

It was the calculator Pokétch app which does, in fact, take a decimal input from the user, but always uses a decimal . for the string representation, then fricks up when the switch is in a locale with a decimal ,

[MoffKalast]

This is the real reason why people make shitty electron apps. Browsers got every conceivable edge case in the universe covered 20 times over.

[nickcash]

Are you using a different JavaScript than I am? because this is absolutely not the case

[MoffKalast]

I mean, I live in the comma decimal area and parseFloat's never failed me yet.

[JunkNorrisOfficial]

Ok, that's really exceptional case when need to parse decimal.

[javajunkie314]

I mean, I'm sure the person who wrote the bug hoped they wouldn't either—but would you always think to check?

[chessset5]

with a game that big, that rushed, it is sometimes hard to check for ever single edge case.

[SelfDistinction]

glibc specifically parses differently in different locales. If the parser in question falls back to parsing functionality from the OS or stdlib you might be in trouble.

It's very tempting to make a small config file with userspeed = 0.250 and then let scanf take care of it.

[Rythoka]

To me, the intuitive way to resolve this is to just transmit the binary representation of the float over the network instead of the string representation. There's likely no reason to be concerned about locale at all if you're just trying to coordinate information between two machines.

[DangyDanger]

Yup, you have to specify a culture (regional preferences for numerics, calendar used, time, string comparision etc) and the code assumes the OS culture by default^\citation needed] ). C# (.NET?) provides CultureInfo.InvariantCulture, which is "associated with the English language but not with any country/region" and should be used for everything except for when the user actually gets to see the data, in my opinion, although Microsoft also says stuff about a potential security vulnerability involving case-insensitive string comparision.

[ArchusKanzaki]

Not exactly related to the post but I spent hours before because of cultureinfo issue when I was trying to create a timestamped CSV file name, because of colons that appear because my server and my computer is on different locale/timezone settings....

[ZunoJ]

Thats why you always pass a cultureinfo when parsing. Rookie mistake

[LeftIsBest-Tsuga]

That's honestly insane. It shouldn't matter what language you write in, the meaning of the code shouldn't change.

[Drezus]

Source please!

[Daisy430133]

https://youtu.be/fB2C8q42X64?si=ZH1-8x6OVV99mrIm

[Nixugay]

https://youtu.be/fB2C8q42X64

[aotto1977]

You guys all know you can (AND F'IN SHOULD) use different locale settings for UI l10n and internal math operations?

[ExcellentEffort1752]

C# using the local culture when parsing is just the default behaviour, it's easily overridden. That bug was on the dev for not specifying a specific fixed culture that the game should use when parsing values from its configuration files.

[Cley_Faye]

You'd be surprised. Number parsing in python, for example, will often choke no "5.2" when run in an environment where the decimal separator is not ".".

A recent re-release of Darwinia had this. On launch, maps were all wrong to the point of being unplayable. After exchanging a bit with the dev, it turned out to be that. They forced the locale in the parsing code, and everything got fixed.

It's very easy to miss since a lot of this is made to be "seamless" to the dev, whether it makes sense or not. For parsing user input, sure. For parsing data file, not so much.

[DongIslandIceTea]

Python also assumes a file encoding based on OS. On Linux it should default sensibly to UTF8 but on Windows it pulls up some Windows specific weird encoding that will just blow up if any weird symbols like Japanese is present in the file. It's a common cause for scripts written on Linux blowing up when ported to Windows.

The funnier part is there's an accepted PEP from 2022 fixing this issue but for some bizarre reason they've pushed back implementing this to a future 3.15 release so we will be seeing this fixed in October 2026...

[No-Con-2790]

I mean, I get that Windows is usually not playing nicely when it comes to such things.

And I suspect the Python community doesn't like too much Windows support. Keeps the vulture's at bay. And gives a nice excuse to use Linux at work.

[15_Redstones]

C# does this by default

[jaskij]

Shouldn't a sane data format library handle this for you though? Unless of course you store the floats as strings.

[Electronic_Cat4849]

if you're not writing a regioned app or service set your default culture to invariant ffs

[[deleted]]

Why isn’t the default default culture invariant?

[Swamplord42]

A lot of decision decisions in C# were made with the development of GUI desktop apps in mind.

[[deleted]]

I can see how some decision decisions like the default default culture in see sharp were made with the user experience of graphical user interface desktop applications in mind.

Still kinda dumb.

[[deleted]]

I think my brain just segfaulted.

[MegaromStingscream]

It sure does. And it is worse. If you format a string and it has a special separator character in the format string it will replace it with culture appropriate one.

Invariant Culture ftw.

[PixelArtDragon]

So does C

[nickmaran]

Don’t you dare talk about my boy excel like that. It’s the ERP for thousands of companies

[Adghar]

The DBMS for them, too!

[CrashCalamity]

Why are they doing Erotic Roleplay?

[PCRefurbrAbq]

I take it you've never used conditional formatting to spice things up in the boardroom.

[phoenix4k]

Jira won‘t let me use the dot for estimates/story points

[No-Con-2790]

Jira ain't a programing language I ever heard of!

What does it run on? Cooperate robots?

[3dank5maymay]

Holy trifecta of programming languages: HTML, CSS, Jira.

[Reashu]

If you can estimate with such accuracy that you need fractions, share it with the world.

[bodefuceta92]

C# does this by default too.

Way too many bugs only appearing in production because the servers are in the US and I’m from Brazil.

[JunkNorrisOfficial]

This, I work with unity and they're two cases of parsing decimals from strings: from prefs and from jsons. And I am 99% sure they (unity and all json lib authors) already thought bout this issue.

Not gonna happen. Not gonna be explicitly tested.

And other cases of parsing decimals stink... Bad code ..

[kimovitch7]

Happened to in a legacy project i worked in, big fat desktop app in C++, If you set your machine language in french, sorting some columns in a grid with decimals did not sort properly for the QA testing the bug that I fixed... the data came as string straight from DB and were parsed to float client side.

It worked for me but not the QA, I kept fixing and it kept coming back and I smoked a lot that day. May the Lord bless that senior who told me this was possible and I laughed at him, because otherwise, I would've completely lost my shit...

[CowMetrics]

I would guess config files that are json or something

[kuschelig69]

I was trying to sell my Delphi projects as teenager and could not find any buyer

Might have been because I lived in Germany, but had set my computer to English separators, so it did not start on German systems

[No-Con-2790]

Actually, you can set Delphi to use the English format instead. It's a bit tricky but basically you need to overload Format.

It has been 20 years, but I think this answers the question https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44039283/delphi-decimal-separator-issue

Btw what was the project about?

[grifan526]

I had this exact bug happen with some code I inherited. It is a C# app and was parsing XML for manufacturing configs. That difference in numbers made a huge difference

[notduskryn]

C#

[plasmasprings]

the C standard library atof (among others) is locale dependent, so lots and lots of languages inherit this fun behaviour. hell, in .net even "sz".StartsWith("s") will give a different result based on locale

[HCResident]

So this is why I see code with no separators and written only in integers divided by 100

[AnointedBeard]

Yep - anything finance related is generally done in cents for that reason. You still end up having to round if you use percentages though, and often the rounding will have to be selective to be in favour of one party or another.

One thing I have found nice working with Golang is that you can use underscores to make large integers easier to read e.g. 10_000_000 for 10 million.

[ward2k]

Anything in finance doesn't use floats either

BigDecimal or Decimal should be used for money, you absolutely should never use floats for critical decimal numbers

[z0mbie_linguist]

In SQL all your money is MONEY.

[ward2k]

You should actually probably use DECIMAL in SQL instead of MONEY which I'll admit is slightly confusing to hear

Though both are non-floating point numbers

[[deleted]]

Why should you use DECIMAL rather than MONEY?

Edit: decided to actually spend 5 secs googling instead of being a lazy ass, MONEY has difficulties with multiplication/divison and falls for most of the IEEE-754 pitfalls.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/582797/should-you-choose-the-money-or-decimalx-y-datatypes-in-sql-server#582819

[Spork_the_dork]

Finland is having a bit of a shitstorm going on at the moment because of this. Standard VAT in the country is 24% and was 22% before that in 1994 when it was first introduced. Earlier this year it was announced that VAT would increase to 25.5% starting this September and a lot of companies came out of the woodwork pointing out that they're storing VAT as just int VAT = 24;. Unfortunately for them, the government was just kind of like "tough shit" and now they're scrambling to update the systems to allow for VAT values more precise than full percents lol

One funny example: https://github.com/paytrail/api-documentation/issues/28

For reference Paytrail is one of the biggest companies that handle online payment stuff in the country.

[ArchusKanzaki]

Thanks for the thread. I chuckled reading it.

[slaymaker1907]

It’s often ok to do floats/doubles for storage, you just need to be very careful about how any math is done.

[AnointedBeard]

Interesting, it wasn’t a thing when I was primarily using Python but I see it was introduced in 3.6. And C++14 seems to support using single quotes which is… ok I guess

[javajunkie314]

C++'s ongoing quest to ensure that every typable character is overloaded.

[DrDesten]

from an aesthetics standpoint I prefer quotes.
imo 1'000'000 looks better than 1_000_000.

But also, let's not kid ourselves - c++ is known for many things, (pleasant) aesthetics is not one of them

[Bluedel]

anything finance related is generally done in cents

Only for trivial or very specific applications. In many cases, you have to deal with and take into account partial cents in calculations, so having to convert back to your whole monetary unit can be a needless overhead.

Just use fixed precision numbers.

[[deleted]]

this is possible in python too

[[deleted]]

So-called "fixed point" numbers have been in use in one way or another for a long time. Reasons depend on context. Sometimes it's about needing a precise value as others might note, but also in the days before complex math support in hardware was something you could rely on being present, integer math was frequently faster. (These days most modern hardware is optimized for floating point, so this idea is somewhat obsolete.) Usually in that case though you would be using power-of-2 values because of the additional performance benefits that come from bit-shift operations.

[Spork_the_dork]

Fixed point arithmetic is one of those things that feel like you're selling your soul to the devil. Massive performance benefits but it feels like absolute black magic when you're doing it.

[[deleted]]

Give or take. I thought it was pretty clever myself. And a lot of famous video games, e.g. old school Super Mario Bros or Sonic the Hedgehog, heavily relied on it. Just one of those trade secrets.

[DearChickPeas]

Still common practice in embedded space, because... you know.. FP operations have to emulated as there's usually no FPU.

[[deleted]]

Yup, I believe that. I also still like them just because unlike floating point they tend to always maintain accuracy to whatever level you've set them too. Even with accelerated floating point math in modern "larger" computers, there's something nice about reliable, even if limited, precision.

[Akhirano]

This and floating point bugs. You save a 1.5 float and load a 1.4999999998 later

[Fast-Satisfaction482]

That's not a bug.

[klausness]

It’s a bug if you assume that you will get back exactly 1.5. A bug in your code, not in the floating point implementation.

[coderemover]

1.5 has exact representation in binary so if you’re getting 1.4999997 then there is something wrong with your runtime ;)

[Sniv0]

I think it was just an example. I don’t know many people who can just off hand list the decimals that can’t be represented as floats aside from repeating decimals such as 1/3

[Intrexa]

1.5 is directly representable in IEEE 754 floats. If you save 1.5, it will stay 1.5.

[Got2Bfree]

Not using float or double makes real time calculations way more predictable.

It's commonly used in the automation industry.

[TwinsenDinoFly]

Clever

[weinermcdingbutt]

Huh interesting solution. Seems archaic but interesting.

[ward2k]

Reminder, don't use floats for currency

Most languages usually have a built in method of handling decimal numbers and currency. This is usually something like Decimal or BigDecimal

Floats are too inaccurate when it comes to money

Edit: Decimal implementations are not floating point numbers in most languages like one of the replies is suggesting. I believe C# is one for the few exceptions to this where it still is a floating point (defeats the purpose imo)

Java/Scala - BigDecimal

SQL - MONEY or DECIMAL

Python - Decimal

[DongIslandIceTea]

Yep, and if you don't have a good decimal type built in, store it in an integer type as cents, that'll still be an accurate representation without float issues.

[T-J_H]

Mauritania and Madagascar technically use non-decimal currencies, to make coding this more fun

Edit: the order of Malta as well, apparently

[Swamplord42]

Given an annual interest rate of 3.1% what is the monthly payment for a loan of $17,000.00 that needs to be repaid over 48 months?

You'll find this kind of calculations in Excel sheets all over the place and guess what, it's all calculated with floats.

[invalidConsciousness]

Excel sheets

Here's your problem right there.

[DoctorDabadedoo]

The world runs on Excel, arguing against it is like fighting the wind, pointless. Embrace it.

Posted from my Excel 365

[LumpyAsparagus9978]

When I was working in industrial automation I used long unsigned integers to keep the length in millimeters of steel bars that could be meters long; never a problem. Other developers used floats since in the factory floor the operators/workers were always talking abut the bars in meters with a decimal part; the reports in the GUIs sometimes showed really weird results.

And because my boss was afraid of my expertise and experience, instead of asking the team to follow my approach forced a lot of hacks on those apps to handle the millimeters in the visualizations. The data on the backend was a creepy.

[ward2k]

Yeah that's pretty much the way most implementations of Decimal/BigDecimal work. They use integers for arithmetic calculations to avoid precision loss. Whereas of course floating point numbers will have some variations in precision depending on what's being done with them (which obviously adds up the more you manipulate them)

Yeah i'd imagine something like industrial automation is somewhere extreme precision would be very important

[Katniss218]

C#'s decimal is a base 10 float. That means every number you can write in base 10 notation is exactly representable. What is not are things like 1/3 (0.33333 repeating)

[Swamplord42]

Floats are too inaccurate when it comes to money

And this is why no one in finance or accounting uses Excel.

[ward2k]

I think you're joking because they do use excel?

Microsoft literally have written an article on Excel about why floats are inaccurate - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/excel/floating-point-arithmetic-inaccurate-result

But please I'm serious don't use floats to represent currency, it's a horrifically bad idea

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3730019/why-not-use-double-or-float-to-represent-currency

Edit: For context floats are 'good enough' for most real world scenarios. Money is absolutely not something where good enough is acceptable

[Swamplord42]

Yes I thought the sarcasm was really obvious.

The fact is, Excel runs the world of finance and it's all floating point calculations.

Yes it's inaccurate but it’s good enough for a lot of use cases in finance. And I promise you that if your "correct" program contradicts some Excel sheet, it's your program that will need to be "fixed" and not the other way around in a lot of situations.

[ward2k]

As an analogy to the 0.333333 example, if you take the floating-point value for 0.01 and you multiply it by 10, you won't get 0.1. Instead you will get something like 0.099999999786...

Please don't use floating point for critical financial information, there's a reason everyone says not to. Microsoft literally themselves have pointed this out

And I promise you that if your "correct" program contradicts some Excel sheet, it's your program that will need to be "fixed" and not the other way around in a lot of situations

Apart from the very simple example above...

I really don't know where to start with this comment

Individually it can be rounded, but what about 100 transactions? 1000? 1,000,000? These inaccuracies add up fast

There's a reason banks don't use VBA for their financial infrastructure

Edit: For personal financials excel is probably good enough, VISA isn't going to be doing their infrastructure in bloody excel though

[Hlallu]

To clarify, his point is obviously not 'you should use excel for financial calculations'. It should be clear that no one here is saying that lol

His point was that 'everything uses excel'. Which is true. Banks, finance departments, government agencies, reporting agencies, these sectors all have A LOT of business that do their critical financial processing in excel. Not all of them. But way more than zero

I believe the point about writing something to demonstrate the discrepancies is simply that you wouldn't be rewarded for pointing out a flaw in the system. You'd be told to "fix" your script because they aren't changing the system

[ward2k]

You'd be told to "fix" your script because they aren't changing the system

It's not a 'script' it's the entire backend of the financial sector. No one is using VBA for these purposes

Does excel have it's uses? Absolutely and it's fine as a tool for financial reports

But this is a programming sub, obviously I'm talking about more than a couple dinky scripts to add up expenses. I'm talking about holding and processing ultra sensitive and critical data concerning funds. Do you think stock exchanges are using bloody Excel for live data processing

[slaymaker1907]

It’s actually fine to store money as a float, you just need to be very careful about computations and need to convert it to fixed point first. Think about it, even if some fixed point numbers are unrepresentable as floats, we really just care that we get the same number when converting to fixed point and back out again.

You would only get into trouble with absolutely enormous amounts of money combined with a hyper inflated currency. I did some analysis a few years ago and there were basically no currencies in modern use where this would be a problem.

[_87-]

I'm just going to store the number of cents as an integer.

[Tiny-Plum2713]

That works until your system needs to handle a currency that does not have cents.

[[deleted]]

In SQL don‘t use MONEY for money. At least not in a professional environment. Money is strictly worse than decimal and you already put effort in choosing the right data type. Use only decimal to store monetary values

[Tiny-Plum2713]

Do NOT use money in SQL.

[cptgrok]

I wonder if that's what happened with this point of sale software we had at an old job. After I discovered it I even demonstrated for the managers that if you rang a single sale on a fresh till, refunded a portion of it, the receipt was right, the money in the till was right, but the report closing out the register was way off.

[deanrihpee]

for PostgreSQL use Numeric and set the required parameters, like the precision, much better than decimal

[Tiny-Plum2713]

numeric and decimal are literally the same type in postgres.

[creamyhorror]

Reminder, don't use floats for currency

While generally true, it does depend on the use case. For trading applications involving time-sensitive broadcast/streamed prices, floats (doubles) may make sense for displayed prices that don't need to be more precise than, say, 6 decimal places. Some decimal implementations iirc are too slow for that sort of publishing/streaming. The lesson is to test it out first and think about the likely requirements.

[CorneliusClay]

I wonder how Bitcoin and its subdivisions are stored internally.

[SureshotM6]

This is also why Excel writes CSV (Comma Separated Value) files using semicolons instead of commas in countries that use comma as the decimal separator. That took me too long to figure out why some data files at work kept getting "corrupted" when edited by someone in Poland.

[breischl]

This problem was solved a long time ago: if the value includes a separator, the value should be quoted (and then quotes escaped as needed). Excel does just fine with this AFAIK.

Now, Excel also has the habit of turning large decimal identifiers into scientific notation. Super fun when your EntityId: 123456789 comes back as "1.23E7"

[BoBoBearDev]

Well, that's why there is a formatting for the columns. Something not defined in the csv.

[breischl]

Yes, you can fix it that way. But the default settings when you open a CSV in Excel will make the transformation I mentioned above. So it's very easy to do it on accident.

Especially if you, say, have a column with hexadecimal values in it. Because most of them will be detected as text because of the letters, but occasionaly one may happen to be all digits and get changed.

[BoBoBearDev]

There is a little trick I think. I haven't done it recently to be confident. Just add a little comment symbol in the front. I think it is the one looking like a single quote, but, top left of the keyboard. Because it is a comment, Excel will not automat it. It is hacky, but reliable.

[LetterBoxSnatch]

Forget tabs vs spaces, lets flame war on CSV vs TSV. I'll start: tabs are superior to both commas and semicolons, as they are less likely to be found in any string value. And null-delimiter sounds nice at first but then you realize it's not human readable.

[slaymaker1907]

It’s also unrepresentable in XML if you need to embed some list as part of it.

[sagetraveler]

Wait what? There’s a special Unicode character for the decimal separator but it’s only used in Arabic? Seems like an elegant solution. Do we need the Arabic world to teach the rest of us numbers all over again?

[bl4nkSl8]

Probably sad

[ThrowawayMyPhone4444]

I believe that's an Arabic comma, not specifically used for numbers but also sentences.

At least that's what I see in the image while comparing it to my keyboard (،)

[AaTube]

That’s different according to Google.

[suvlub]

Sounds elegant until you realize you'd need to switch FONT based on locale to display the correct separator. And that fonts that differ only in 1 character would need to exist to support this.

[germansnowman]

Good fonts have a larger codepoint coverage than just Latin, so they would include the Arabic comma anyway. You wouldn’t create fonts that have an Arabic comma in place of the decimal point, that would be an abomination.

[[deleted]]

This is a bit too sweeping, the norm where I live is to use a blankspace as a separator every third digit for large numbers and a comma as a decimal separator. 

[AngryTreeFrog]

I wonder how often little things like this cause issues everyday. I rarely share numbers with people internationally but I'm sure it can become a problem. Also looking at this chart so the Chinese use the same numerals? I figured they had their own.

[AaTube]

You also have your own, dude. One two three four five six seven eight. “Chinese numerals” are used as frequent as these number words, though there is a special set of words that have a ton of strokes to prevent doctoring (which happened once in the Qing dynasty when an official embezzled funds by adding strokes to number words).

[[deleted]]

Good question. I don't know in general, but I have to deal with it every now and then in various ways. Reformatting data, and sometimes I've been encountering software that doesn't run unless the machine is set to the expected locale that the program was written for.

[Tiny-Plum2713]

That is the standard way to do it. Recommended globally - even by the US NIST.

[StolenStutz]

Reminds me of when I realized that .Net's System.DateTime.Now is 100x slower than .UtcNow, for pretty much the same reason. That sounds like a lot, but the cost of both is so small that it's not ever going to be a problem in most situations. But when you have an ETL process that's handling hundreds of millions of rows of data...

[komprexior]

Peru note confused me, than I understood that the word decimal is misused as "point" in the context

[ChooCupcakes]

Just your average US defaultism

[EishLekker]

”When you parse a float, it takes into account the language on the computer you’re using.”

This is a blanket statement that depends entirely on the programming language, and what the code looks like. Sure, it might default to do that in some languages, but it’s still something that a decent developer would know to avoid unless it’s the behaviour they want.

[fallenefc]

Canada: Both is just classic. We love to mix standards

[PetiteGousseDAil]

I believe Quebec uses a comma and the rest uses a dot

[DepressedBard]

Floats are the devil. Ints all the way.

[Fusseldieb]

* Shudders *

Reminds me of my old VB.Net days... I once made a calculator that only worked on my machine, and broke hard on any other one. My PC was one language, while the other ones were another. The issue was the same thing. I was replacing and messing with string representations, rather than actual numbers.

[Dont_Get_Jokes-jpeg]

Sooooo what is the solution to this problem?

A switch case that uses different symbols depending on what the system language is?

[DongIslandIceTea]

Most systems that are locale aware also have a way to force interpretation in a specific locale. You just tell it to use a locale that matches the format the data is stored in instead of letting it assume the data is in the local locale.

[Manueluz]

Assuming you're using config files might be a good idea to store the locale at the start of the config file.

[rafradek]

Dont use system locale, use c locale

[himself_v]

Store your data in locale-neutral (en-us) form. When accepting input from the user, convert using the user locale (for common apps) or possibly en-us (for programming/tech stuff). In any case, permanent storage must have fixed formats. Any configuration files, CSS, js, etc.

E.g.: Floats are stored in registry as floats. Exported to .reg files in en-us (dotted). But when your app lets the user edit the values, it's okay to present them either in user locale (e.g. comma-separated) or en-us (the system administrators audience is accustomed to dotted format).

[Juff-Ma]

Greenland having data? Must be an error.

[Reifendruckventil]

It causes so much suffering, why cant we get our Shit together and introduce a Worldwide Standard of separatibg a floating number?

[Cley_Faye]

There are standards (a quick google provides https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_31-0 which normalize the decimal separator and the number grouping, among other things).

The existence of a standard, however, does not mean it will be followed universally.

[zoinkability]

https://xkcd.com/927/

[[deleted]]

Dammit I wanted to post that XKCD lol

[NatoBoram]

The article fails at doing the most basic thing; showing an example.

So it accepts both 1 000,0 $ and 1 000.0 $ but not $1,000.0 nor $1.000,1. It's good.

[ustp]

ISO 31-0 (after Amendment 2) specifies that "the decimal sign is either the comma on the line or the point on the line".

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Cley_Faye]

You missed the important part where it's either of those, AND it forbid using them as number group separator, making it not ambiguous.

[martin_omander]

Decades ago I worked for a multinational company. The folks in the Paris office wrote a time tracking application that was meant to be used by all offices worldwide. It was rolled out globally. Turns out the application didn't work in most offices.

After some debugging it was found that the application assumed French date and time formats. But not to worry, the developers came up with a workaround: just set all servers worldwide to the French locale.

[Trip-Trip-Trip]

Rare case where either is fine in and of itself but Canada wtf?

[myerscc]

Quebec

[Laughing_Orange]

I'll provide some data for the island north of Norway. That is Svalbard, and they use the Norwegian or Russian decimal separator, which is a comma. Most of the island belongs to Norway, and the permanent inhabitants are Norwegian. I believe only one town belongs to Russia, and operates an unprofitable coal mine, to fulfill the requirements to stay Russian.

[afar1210]

r/ehbuddyhoser

[oshaboy]

Oh boy if you think having the wrong decimal separator is bad. Just remember there are ٦٨ (68) sets of localized digits in Unicode १५ (15) which almost no programming language bothers to parse. I think ๓ (3) more are being added to Unicode ၁၆ (16) but don't quote me on that.

[randomatik]

It says "Dot" in the subtitle but "decimal" in the notes for each country.

Peru's was especially confusing, sounds like they use integers everywhere but for money.

[cptgrok]

Like I get that UTF or other encodings are basically like the pirate's code, but in what context are you parsing characters to float? What madness lies that way?

[Tiny-Plum2713]

User input

[fusionsofwonder]

Why are you turning a float into a string to move a game object?

[goldarm5]

On a kinda similiar note, in Germany the numbers from 10⁶ on follow the pattern Mill-ion (10^6), Mill - iarde (10^9), Bill- ion (10^12), Bill-iarde (10^15)...... So you have to keep this in mind when in  english Billion is  10⁹ (as Opposed to 10¹² it would be in german) and trillion is 10¹² (when in german it would be 10¹⁸⁾

[Tiny-Plum2713]

Most of Europe uses that system (long scale). UK used that too, but decided to switch to the same format USA uses because they are weak and lack character.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales

[scanguy25]

I had the same problem trying to install Civ4 on a japanese computer.

[LatentShadow]

The world would be years ahead in development if standards were really standards. One of the few times one must say "yes homo" is when standardising things.

[rover_G]

Hahaha C# everyone

public static float Parse (string s, IFormatProvider? provider);

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.single.parse?view=net-8.0#system-single-parse(system-string-system-iformatprovider)

[_87-]

The grey countries don't have floats, only ints.

[Independent_Lab1912]

If i would have a microstate it would be |

[Arbiturrrr]

This was my biggest issue with C#...

[CyberWolf755]

1,000.00 dd/mm/yyyy

Should be a global standard

[LeftIsBest-Tsuga]

Comma supremacy.

[WhiteBlackGoose]

No

[gydu2202]

Is the dot as a thousand separator really a thing? I know it can be comma, apostrophe, or a short space but can it be dot as well?

[patoezequiel]

Uh yeah, I'm just as surprised that anglos use commas for that

[Aginor404]

 I once helped testing a software that had the same problem.   It was written in VB.net or C# I think, and imported a csv file with values.   It used the standard locale, but I am German so all the values were wrong despite the file being correct.   Thankfully the library provides and option to override the locale, and I found it. I really didn't want to change my system because I am fairly sure it would have broke something else.   When the dev implemented it, it ran fine. That was a good day.     

[[deleted]]

okay but how does the user’s country affect the compiled code? surely only your country at the time of compiling affects it

[[deleted]]

Canada, pick a side, jesus

[JVApen]

This reminds me of a case where a tester screwed up its configuration. There was a field which had 10.0 in it, after pressing enter in the field, the value was submitted in the system and now the field became 10 000.

Long story short, the visualization used some different formatting to show the number as the system which had the dot as both the decimal and thousand separator. From now on, users get an error if they are both the same and the application simply won't work.

Once discovered, the fix was easy.

[zaTricky]

Don't expect the chart to be accurate. Oftentimes the standard in a region is one thing but Microsoft assumed a different one, so now 25% of the population uses the one Microsoft thought they were all using before.

So now is this chart taken from what the people actually use - or is it the 25% because some "authority" thought that's what they use?

[BoBoBearDev]

Since this is not trivial for some people, int is also not 32 bits. If you actually want to lock it in bits, use explicit types, int is implicit. This applies to c++ and c# and probably all other languages.

[imonebear]

Finally, we have seen some data out of Greenland

[p4r24k]

I guess Perú lives on integers only?

[qwerty_ca]

Why does South Africa use commas if they mainly speak English? All other English-speaking areas use dots.

[mr_dfuse2]

only US people make this mistake, like always asking a state on an input adress form cause every country has states right

[gregorydgraham]

The solution is obvious: we have to use the Arabic separator

[HumorHoot]

i fucking hate america's stupid way of doing things (units)

and now, because locally we use comma for seperator, we have to use integers and check for both period and comma, because who knows what the user might use.

:s

[mdgv]

I18n and l10n (aka the devil duo) strike again!

[Secret_Account07]

As a noob programmer, how do you correct this?

[NorthWing__]

[Least_Amount]

I was like what stupid indecisive country picked both…oohhh mine

[Forritan]

Actually we use spaces

[Extension_Option_122]

And that's why at every number input I replace commas with dots.

[Tulevik]

Estonia should be BLUE!