Support for formatter formats

[yarrouye]

Hi,

I was looking at the source for Joda Money as it has no way to get a formatter for a specific locale, and noticed a couple commented out functions in MoneyFormatterBuilder taking patterns... Is that something you are working on and is coming up, or something that was abandoned?

[jodastephen]

Its something I was too busy to finish. I think patterns like that would be a good feature.

[yarrouye]

I agree. Is this something you're going to get back to?

I would probably want to use the standard notation for patterns (i.e.
###.## and using the currency symbol etc. rather than or at least in
addition to a verbose format with {$someName}" which may be what you had in
mind with your singletons? And I also think that part of localization
should also support for proper use of separators between amounts and
currencies.

I would actually have put those in a MoneyFormat class, similar to
DateTimeFormat in Joda Time. What do you think? I may give it a shout... if
so I'd appreciate understanding your thinking behind what you had started.

On Mon, Mar 17, 2014 at 3:10 PM, Stephen Colebourne <
notifications@github.com> wrote:

Its something I was too bus to finish. I think patterns like that would be
a good feature.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/38#issuecomment-37877343
.

[jodastephen]

I think a combination of ### type patterns and $ type patterns would be useful. Feel free to propose something, I'm not going to get to work on it anytime soon.

In general, Joda-Time tends to try to be reasonably compatible with JDK patterns, so I'd expect money to do the same. No need to slavishly follow JDK mistakes though.

[yarrouye]

I agree re: compatibility. The main issue I see right now with the Joda
Money formatter (at a VERY quick glance) is that it treats the currency and
the amount as two very separate things, when really they are not. For
example, the default way to format "-123.33 in USD" in Java and other
frameworks for the Locale.US locale is "($123.33)" where the parenthesis
come from the fact that the amount is negative, and the rest is regular
currency formatting. Your pattern APIs seem to have that going on, but I do
not know if those would be easy to map to your singletons (I guess one
could always write a singleton that always write abs(amount) and use that
appropriately when mapping patterns).

The Printer/Parser concept works well outside of the builder in any case; I
was able to whip out a MoneyFormat.forLocale(Locale) that returned a
formatter implementing both the printer and parser interfaces using the
JDK's DecimalFormat class in very few lines of codes. However, I put this
in my own libraries rather than yours as I believe the latter would require
a grounds up implementation of the code; and I haven't found a good public
source of currency formats I could bring into such code...

On Mon, Mar 17, 2014 at 3:24 PM, Stephen Colebourne <
notifications@github.com> wrote:

I think a combination of ### type patterns and $ type patterns would be
useful. Feel free to propose something, I'm not going to get to work on it
anytime soon.

In general, Joda-Time tends to try to be reasonably compatible with JDK
patterns, so I'd expect money to do the same. No need to slavishly follow
JDK mistakes though.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/38#issuecomment-37878674
.

[jodastephen]

Just to note that the elements within the formatter do not have to be singletons, they can be private immutable inner classes with state. See Joda-Time/JSR-310 formatter for examples of this.

Currency/Money data is present in CLDR, which is where Oracle/JDK gets its data.