[Python-Dev] Formatting mini-language suggestion
James Y Knight
foom at fuhm.net
Thu Mar 12 02:33:55 CET 2009
On Mar 11, 2009, at 9:06 PM, Nick Coghlan wrote:
> Raymond Hettinger wrote:
>> The current formatting mini-language provisions left/right/center
>> alignment, prefixes for 0b 0x 0o, and rules on when to show the
>> plus-sign. I think it would be far more useful to provision a simple
>> way of specifying a thousands separator.
>>
>> Financial users in particular find the locale approach to be
>> frustrating
>> and non-obvious. Putting in a thousands separator is a common task
>> for
>> output destined to be read by non-programmers.
>
> +1 for the general idea.
>
> A specific syntax proposal:
>
> [[fill]align][sign][#][0][minimumwidth][,sep][.precision][type]
>
> 'sep' is the new field that defines the thousands separator. It
> appears
> immediately before the precision specifier and starts with a leading
> comma.
>
> I believe this syntax is unambiguous and backwards compatible because
> the only other place a comma might appear (the fill field) is required
> to be followed by an alignment character.
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? :)
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_numbering_system
James
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