Location Based Currency Formatting in Java

Most of the applications today, which are targeted for a larger audience e.g. internet users, usually deal in money as well. In such application, a requirement will be to display money/currency in a format specific to that location or country. In this tutorial, I am giving some examples which will help you in location specific currency formatting in java.

I am first listing the classes used in examples, and then we will look at the real example codes.

Classes used in currency formatting in java

Below are the major java classes which are used to format locale based currencies.

1. java.util.Locale : This class is used to get the location information of the end user which is currently using your application.
2. java.util.Currency : This class represents a currency. The class is designed so that there’s never more than one Currency instance for any given currency. Therefore, there’s no public constructor. You obtain a Currency instance using the getInstance methods.
3. java.text.NumberFormat : NumberFormat helps you to format and parse numbers for any locale. We will use it’s getCurrencyInstance() method to get the currency number formatter.

Read More: How to get current user locale

Currency formatting examples

Let’s list down very basic uses of above classes to display a raw number into currency format.

Format according to US locale

import java.text.NumberFormat;
import java.util.Currency;
import java.util.Locale;

public class NumberToCurrencyExamples
{
   public static void main(String[] args)
   {
      //This is the amount which we want to format
      Double currencyAmount = new Double(123456789.555);
      
      //Get current locale information
      Locale currentLocale = Locale.getDefault();
      
      //Get currency instance from locale; This will have all currency related information
      Currency currentCurrency = Currency.getInstance(currentLocale);
      
      //Currency Formatter specific to locale
      NumberFormat currencyFormatter = NumberFormat.getCurrencyInstance(currentLocale);

      //Test the output
      System.out.println(currentLocale.getDisplayName());
      
      System.out.println(currentCurrency.getDisplayName());
      
      System.out.println(currencyFormatter.format(currencyAmount));
   }
}

Output:

English (United States)
US Dollar
$123,456,789.56

Now let’s modify the locale to of France and observe the output:

Format according to FR locale

public static void main(String[] args)
{
  //This is the amount which we want to format
  Double currencyAmount = new Double(123456789.555);
  
  //Using France locale
  Locale currentLocale = Locale.FRANCE;
  
  //Get currency instance from locale; This will have all currency related information
  Currency currentCurrency = Currency.getInstance(currentLocale);
  
  //Currency Formatter specific to locale
  NumberFormat currencyFormatter = NumberFormat.getCurrencyInstance(currentLocale);

  //Test the output
  System.out.println(currentLocale.getDisplayName());
  
  System.out.println(currentCurrency.getDisplayName());
  
  System.out.println(currencyFormatter.format(currencyAmount));
}

Output:

French (France)
Euro
123 456 789,56 €

Easy enough. Isn’t it?

That’s all for this very basic usecase examples of currency formatting in java.

Happy Learning !!

Reference: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/i18n/format/numberFormat.html