internationalization - PHP: Locale aware number format

Question

I want to format the number 3253454 for my website visitors.

If I use the inbuilt number_format function, I get: 3,253,454 which is great for UK and USA, however most other countries use 3.253.454

I have many international visitors.

Can anyone give me a pointer to the best practice here?

Ideally I wish to get the browser's locale and format the number accordingly. Is this even possible in PHP?

Answer 1

If you're deploying a localized website, you're going to want to make sure you setlocale(). To riff off of yaauie's above post I'd add something like the following code snippet in your initialization code:

$locale = ( isset($_COOKIE['locale']) ) ? 
            $_COOKIE['locale'] : 
            $_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE'];
setlocale(LC_ALL, $locale);

Then we modify the above function number_format_locale(), to look like so:

function number_format_locale($number,$decimals=2) {
    $locale = localeconv();
    return number_format($number,$decimals,
               $locale['decimal_point'],
               $locale['thousands_sep']);
 }

Of course that's in an ideal world, depending on the platform you deploy to, and what version of the locale files you have installed, you might have to code around some irregularities. But setting locale is going to help with money, numbers, and dates.