I was recently confronted with this problem:
- Read and parse a file with numbers having a dot as a decimal separator.
- Parse the info no matter what culture the user is.
- Don’t affect the current culture.
So here in Quebec, many users are using the "fr-CA" culture that has a comma as the decimal separator. What I would usually do is to change the current culture like this:
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture("en-US");
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = new CultureInfo("en-US");
The downside is that it affects the strings stored in resources files that are displayed to the users. I don’t want to display "en-US" strings to every users. The ideal way would be to specify that a dot is the decimal separator only for specific lines of code. Here’s how to do it with NumberFormatInfo object:
You new a NumberFormatInfo object with the current culture number formatting information and you change the NumberDecimalSeparator to a dot. You then use the object as a parameter for parsing methods.
NumberFormatInfo nfi = new CultureInfo(Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture.LCID, false).NumberFormat;
nfi.NumberDecimalSeparator = ".";
decimal zeeNomebeurre;
string zeeStringue = "2.01";
zeeNomebeurre = decimal.Parse(zeeStringue, nfi);
That's one way to do it but one way I never used before.