How to get NumberFormat instance from currency code?

Question

How can I get a NumberFormat (or DecimalFormat) instance corresponding to an ISO 4217 currency code (such as \"EUR\" or \"USD\") in order to format

Answer 1

Locale can be used both to get the standard currency for the Locale and to print any currency symbol properly in the locale you specify. These are two distinct operations, and not really related.

From the Java Internationalization tutorial, you first get an instance of the Currency using either the Locale or the ISO code. Then you can print the symbol using another Locale. So if you get the US Currency from the en_US Locale, and call getSymbol() it will print "$". But if you call getSymbol(Locale) with the British Locale, it will print "USD".

So if you don't care what your current user's locale is, and you just care about the currencies, then you can ignore the Locale in all cases.

If you care about representing the currency symbol correctly based on your current user, then you need to get the Locale of the user specific to the user's location.