Formatting Large Numbers with .NET

Question

I have a requirement to format large numbers like 4,316,000 as \"4.3m\".

How can I do this in C#?

Answer 1

If you're only running on Windows you could use a p-invoke declaration in C# or VB.NET to call the Win32 functions StrFormatByteSizeW or StrFormatByteSize64. If your application/site is guaranteed to be running on at least Vista SP1 or Server 2008 there's also StrFormatByteSizeEx with a few more options.

Sample from the MSDN docs:

Numeric value   Text string 
532             532 bytes 
1340            1.30KB 
23506           22.9KB 
2400016         2.29MB 
2400000000      2.23GB 

These APIs also handle localization correctly for non-English users.