How can I parse a string with a comma thousand separator to a number?

Question

I have 2,299.00 as a string and I am trying to parse it to a number. I tried using parseFloat, which results in 2. I guess the comma is the problem

Answer 1

On modern browsers you can use the built in Intl.NumberFormat to detect the browser's number formatting and normalize the input to match.

function parseNumber(value, locales = navigator.languages) {
  const example = Intl.NumberFormat(locales).format('1.1');
  const cleanPattern = new RegExp(`[^-+0-9${ example.charAt( 1 ) }]`, 'g');
  const cleaned = value.replace(cleanPattern, '');
  const normalized = cleaned.replace(example.charAt(1), '.');

  return parseFloat(normalized);
}

const corpus = {
  '1.123': {
    expected: 1.123,
    locale: 'en-US'
  },
  '1,123': {
    expected: 1123,
    locale: 'en-US'
  },
  '2.123': {
    expected: 2123,
    locale: 'fr-FR'
  },
  '2,123': {
    expected: 2.123,
    locale: 'fr-FR'
  },
}


for (const candidate in corpus) {
  const {
    locale,
    expected
  } = corpus[candidate];
  const parsed = parseNumber(candidate, locale);

  console.log(`${ candidate } in ${ corpus[ candidate ].locale } == ${ expected }? ${ parsed === expected }`);
}

Their's obviously room for some optimization and caching but this works reliably in all languages.