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Comment by toolslive | Hacker News Reader

I always put my locale in Ireland: I want

  - "proper English"
  - metric system
  - Euro

It's amazing how many web applications give me a broken experience because of it.

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I'm using custom en-CH locales, because I want numbers to use the Swiss format for decimal and thousands, € instead of CHF, standard units, and some version of English :p

How's that going with the numbers? Microsoft had this page where they explained that monetary amounts are formatted one way whereas other numbers are formatted another way. I found that most fascinating, but I don't know whether it matches reality. Also, how does software cope?

(Back in the eighties,) I had a teacher who taught both French and geography (I think), and he used the apostrophe as the thousands separator. With a twist. For example, he would write three million as 3'000'000, and then he would abbreviate that to 3''. Very fascinating. I wonder if that was somehow inspired by Swiss conventions.

1'234'567.890 :)

One billion, two-hundred thirty-four million, five-hundred sixty-seven (the rest are the decimals)

I've never seen 3'' but that's a nice shorthand

I now live in Germany where the format is confusing to me: 1.234.567,890. It's pretty much the opposite of English format!

3e+6 ?

That's not a bad hack, thanks

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