Currency formatting in Python

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Chapters
00:00 Question
00:15 Accepted answer (Score 264)
00:35 Answer 2 (Score 111)
00:50 Answer 3 (Score 57)
01:25 Answer 4 (Score 50)
02:05 Thank you

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Full question
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3209...

Accepted answer links:
[locale]: https://docs.python.org/3/library/locale...

Answer 2 links:
http://docs.python.org/dev/whatsnew/2.7....

Answer 3 links:
[Babel]: http://babel.pocoo.org/

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Tags
#python #formatting #currency

#avk47

ACCEPTED ANSWER

Score 285

See the locale module.

This does currency (and date) formatting.

>>> import locale
>>> locale.setlocale( locale.LC_ALL, '' )
'English_United States.1252'
>>> locale.currency( 188518982.18 )
'$188518982.18'
>>> locale.currency( 188518982.18, grouping=True )
'$188,518,982.18'

ANSWER 2

Score 115

New in 2.7

>>> '{:20,.2f}'.format(18446744073709551616.0)
'18,446,744,073,709,551,616.00'

http://docs.python.org/dev/whatsnew/2.7.html#pep-0378

ANSWER 3

Score 58

Not quite sure why it's not mentioned more online (or on this thread), but the Babel package (and Django utilities) from the Edgewall guys is awesome for currency formatting (and lots of other i18n tasks). It's nice because it doesn't suffer from the need to do everything globally like the core Python locale module.

The example the OP gave would simply be:

>>> import babel.numbers
>>> import decimal
>>> babel.numbers.format_currency( decimal.Decimal( "188518982.18" ), "GBP" )
£188,518,982.18

ANSWER 4

Score 55

This is an ancient post, but I just implemented the following solution which:

Doesn't require external modules
Doesn't require creating a new function
Can be done in-line
Handles multiple variables
Handles negative dollar amounts

Code:

num1 = 4153.53
num2 = -23159.398598

print 'This: ${:0,.0f} and this: ${:0,.2f}'.format(num1, num2).replace('$-','-$')

Output:

This: $4,154 and this: -$23,159.40

And for the original poster, obviously, just switch $ for £