There are various number formats specified by locales, for example Great Britain and the United States 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 (Unicode character U+2009).
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. The information on numeric delimiters for current locale can be obtained by issuing the following command:
$ locale -ck LC_NUMERIC
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