With a browser, how do I know which decimal separator does the operating system use?

Question

I\'m developing a web application.

I need to display some decimal data correctly so that it can be copied and pasted into a certain GUI application that

Answer 1

I think you have to rely on JavaScript to give you the locale settings.
But apparently JS doesn't have direct access to this information.
I see Dojo Toolkit relies on an external database to find the locale information, although it might not take in account setting changes, for example.
Another workaround I see is to have a small silent Java applet that query this information from the system, and JavaScript to get it out of Java.
I can give more information if you don't know how to do it (if you want to go this convoluted route, of course).

[EDIT] So I updated my knowledge of localization support in Java...
Unlike what I thought originally, you won't have directly the decimal separator or thousand separator characters directly, like you would do with line separator or path separator: instead Java offers APIs to format the numbers or dates you provide.
Somehow, it makes sense: in Europe you often put the currency symbol after the number, some countries (India?) have a more complex rule to separate digits, etc.

Another thing: Java correctly finds the current locale from the system, but doesn't take information from there (perhaps for above reasons). Instead it uses its own set of rules. So if you have a Spanish locale where you replaced decimal separator with an exclamation sign, Java won't use it (but perhaps neither your application, anyway...).

So I am writing an applet exposing a service (functions) to JavaScript, allowing to format numbers to the current locale. You can use it as such, using JavaScript to format numbers on the browser. Or you can just feed it with some sample number and extract the symbols from there, using them locally or feeding them back to the server.

I finish and test my applet and post it there soon.