XSLT format-number with comma for indian price

Question

I want to display a price for India, like this:

5,55,555

And not

555,555

There should be

Answer 1

As already mentioned, in XSLT 2.0 you can use:

<xsl:value-of select="format-number(Price, '#,##,###')" />  

This will accommodate numbers up to 9,999,999. Above that, you need to add more separators, e.g.:

<xsl:value-of select="format-number(Price, '##,##,##,###')" />      

will work for numbers up to 999,999,999 and so on.

---

In XSLT 1.0 you can do:

<xsl:choose>
    <xsl:when test="Price >= 1000">
        <xsl:value-of select="format-number(floor(Price div 1000), '#,##')" />
        <xsl:text>,</xsl:text>
        <xsl:value-of select="format-number(Price mod 1000, '000')" />
    </xsl:when>
    <xsl:otherwise>
        <xsl:value-of select="format-number(Price, '#,###')" />
    </xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>

This will work for any magnitude of Price. If you need to reuse this, consider making it a named template.

---

Note that neither method requires you to define a xsl:decimal-format.

Answer 2

The XSLT 2.0 specification of format-number() allows irregular grouping separators as in your example.

The XSLT 1.0 specification is based on the Java specification of DecimalFormat, which requires regular intervals between grouping separators.

(To be more precise: the JDK 7 spec requires regular intervals, or at any rate, it treats the last interval as the one to be used: (the interval between the last one and the end of the integer is the one that is used. So "#,##,###,####" == "######,####" == "##,####,####". But the XSLT 1.0 spec refers specifically to JDK 1.1.8, which is pretty-well unobtainable nowadays; my recollection is that it was very vague on such questions, and later versions of the JDK specification essentially documented the bugs in the initial implementation. To the extent that JDK 1.1.8 was vague, XSLT 1.0 implementations are free to do their own thing.)