Globalization.CultureInfo - CurrencyGroupSizes

Question

Hello,

The WinXp 'Customize Regional Options' dialog lets me select one of following three options for Digit Grouping -

a) 123456789
or
b) 123, 456, 789
or
c) 12,34,56,789 and of course the grouping and decimal separator etc.

Using .Net 2.0, and trying to read the CurrencyGroupSizes property returns an array with length 1 and group size = 3 for both option a and b.

What I'd like to know is, how does one differentiate b/w the two options programatically ? I would like to perform specific processing in my application based on what the user has configured in his install of XP.

Also the Display Leading Zeros option in the customize dialog, I could not find any matching property in the NumberFormat name space. How might I know what the user has set in XP without doing a win32 call ?

Any ideas will be great.
Regards,
Avinash

Answer 1

Regional Options and NumberFormatInfo are an imperfect match.  You can in fact change settings that will prevent the framework from functioning properly.  There is no workaround I'm aware of that fixes all of the possible issues.  In your case, I'd parse a formatted currency value to see what options might have been selected by the user that would affect your output.

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Hans Passant.

Answer 2

Thanks Hans. I tried doing that too.. but it seemed to me that x.ToString() [also tried other over loads with format 'C' , 'N' etc and also  explicitly passing in IformatInfo etc], it did not seem to respect my setting a) 123456789. It always seemed to include group separators.

But I'm not fully certain and might have missed something. Will try it again and see how it goes. Atleast, I now know that ther's no straight forward API that I might have missed.

Thanks again.

Regards,

Avinash