Raymond Hettinger wrote:
[James Y Knight]
You might be interested to know that in India, the commas don't come every 3 digits. In india, they come every two digits, after the first three. Thus one billion = 1,00,00,00,000. How are you gonna represent *that* in a formatting mini-language? :)
It is not the goal to replace locale or to accomodate every possible convention. The goal is to make a common task easier for many users. The current, default use of the period as a decimal point has not proven to be problem eventhough that convention is not universal. For a thousands separator, a comma is a decent choice that makes it easy follow-on with s.replace(',', '_') or somesuch.
In that case, I would simplify my suggestion to: [[fill]align][sign][#][0][minimumwidth][,][.precision][type] Addition to mini language documentation: The ',' option indicates that commas should be included in the output as a thousands separator. As with locales which do not use a period as the decimal point, locales which use a different convention for digit separation will need to use the locale module to obtain appropriate formatting. Guido has asked for a PEP to be developed on python-ideas to define the deliberately limited scope though, so I'm going to bow out of the conversation now... Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia ---------------------------------------------------------------