Number Formats

Great Britain and the United States are two of the few places in the world that use a period to indicate the decimal place. Many other countries use a comma instead. The decimal separator is also called the radix character. Likewise, while Great Britain and the United States use a comma to separate groups of thousands, many other countries use a period instead, and some countries separate thousands groups with a thin space.

Data files containing locale-specific formats are frequently misinterpreted when transferred to a system in a different locale. For example, a file containing numbers in a French format is not useful to a British-specific program.

The following table shows some commonly used numeric formats.

Table 1–3 International Numeric Conventions

Locale	Large Number
Canadian (English)	4,294,967.00
Danish	4.294 967.295,00
Finnish	4 294 967 295,00
French	4 294 967 295,00
German	4,294,967.00
Italian	4.294.967,00
Norwegian	4.294.967.295,00
Spanish	4.294.967.295,00
Swedish	4 294 967 295,00
Great Britain	4,294,967,295.00
United States	4,294,967,295.00
Thai	4,294,967,295.00

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Note –

No particular locale conventions exist that specify how to separate numbers in a list.

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