Locale-Sensitive Objective-C Method

Foundation NSNumberFormatter

NSNumberFormatter setFormat

Internationalization (I18n) Method Overview

This method is for fine grained tuning of number formats.

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I18n Issues

Rather than utilize the System Defaults Database of locale formats, this explicitly overrides the formatting. While whatever is provided may be appropriate for English and a few other preset locales, this may not serve all locales in the future. Even tuning the attribute strings size and color features could require locale sensitivity for cultural or legibility reasons. Some things like currency symbol may need to operate independently of locale, but it's unlikely one needs to tweak very many of these features.

Resolution:

1. Check for completeness - to be sure that you are providing 3 or 2 semi-colon separated patterns (positive-zero-negative or positive-negative)
2. Consider going back to system locale-specific defaults
3. Expose the formats as resources to be determined by localization engineers
4. Use localizedStringFromNumber:numberStyle: so it is more template driven across locales

Generally one needs to pass in locale, encoding or language to ensure that any culture-dependent conversion is done properly. If you determine that the call is i18n-safe, you can use Globalyzer's Ignore Comment functionality to ensure that it isn't picked up in a subsequent scan.

For information about Objective-C Internationalization, click here.