Numbers

Decimal and Thousands Separators

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 the U.K. and U.S. 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. Table 1-3 shows some commonly used numeric formats.

Table 1-3 International Numeric Conventions

Locale	Large Number
Canadian (English and French)	4 294 967 295,000
Danish	4 294 967 295,000
Finnish	4 294 967 295,000
French	4 294 967 295,000
German	4 294 967.295,000
Italian	4.294.967.295,000
Norwegian	4.294.967.295,000
Spanish	4.294.967.295,000
Swedish	4 294 967 295,000
GB-English	4,294,967,295.00
US-English	4,294,967,295.00
Thai	4,294,967,295.00

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 U.K.-specific program.

List Separators

There are no particular locale conventions that specify how to separate numbers in a list. They are sometimes comma-delimited in Great Britain and the U.S., but often spaces and semicolons are used.