Michael Everson wrote:
> There should not be a space between a (symbolic) leading currency
> sign and the figure, by convention in all the currencies that do so.
No, that's not universal. The Italian symbol "L." (also "£" or "Lit.") is
normally separated from the amount. (BTW, no one correct that "is" in "was":
we still have liras for six and a half days :-)
Even Windows "Regional Settings" allows a space between symbol and currency.
The possible layouts for currency in the Control Panels are:
¤1.1
1.1¤
¤ 1.1
1.1 ¤
Notice that "1.1" is used because other parameters (numbers of decimal,
decimal separators, etc.) are in different fields.
Also the C language localization API (locale.h) allows this possibility.
Among the various fields of "struct lconv", there are four which tell
whether currency symbol and amount are separated by a space.
char p_sep_by_space;
char n_sep_by_space;
char int_p_sep_by_space;
char int_n_sep_by_space;
The "int_" ones are for the international symbol (I guess "UDS", "GBP",
etc.), while the other two for the local symbol ("$", "£", etc.). The "p_"
ones are for positive and the "n_" ones for negative values.
> >However since a few months the advertisers in the retailmarket in the
> >Netherlands use the euro and a period to separate euro and eurocents
> >instead of the comma.
In practice, this means that the string "€." is used as the decimal
separator for monetary values.
This is allowed by C's "struct lconv", because the relevant field is defined
as a "char*", which may point to an arbitrarily long string:
char * mon_decimal_point;
Windows "Regional Settings" too allows a decimal separator of arbitrary
length.
> Have you rung any of the type bureaus to ask why? You might start at
> http://www.euro.nl to find someone to discuss about this. I'd be
> interested to learn if there are solid recommendations for this.
>
> >That creates sometimes confusion.
I agree. But the most important thing from my point of view is that this is
compatible with current standards.
> >Are the other European continental retailers doing the same?
Unfortunately I spent my last 12 years writing retail automation software,
but I have never met this requirement in any European country, including the
Netherlands (when NLG where in use).
Rather, this format was required by some USA retailers, who wanted two and a
half dollar to be formatted as:
2$50
> I am given to understand that this shouldn't be done. I have put up a
> page on euro sign formatting at
> http://www.evertype.com/standards/euro/formats.html. There may be
> errors in this; I am not sure what to do about spacing and Portugal
> and Spain.
For Italy, all our customers wanted no space between the euro symbol and the
amount, even those who had it between "L." and amount.
_ Marco
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Feb 22 2002 - 08:25:10 EST