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