Recently Chris Wallace has been writing about formatting numbers in XQuery; as you may remember, I did blog about an XQuery-based format-number function some time ago, providing a partial implementation.
Chris mentions my post in his Wikibooks entry, and he has been so nice to run some tests and identify a few bugs and limitations. As I’ve recently had to “enjoy” a red eye flight on my way back to Boston, I couldn’t resist the temptation to fix some of those issues.
Attached is a better version; it includes also support for the typical functionality you would access through xsl:decimal-format. The XQuery includes the tests that Chris posted on the Wikibooks entry, plus a few more, whose results are:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 | <tests> <test> <code>local:format-number(12345678.9, '#,###.00')</code> <xquery-result>12,345,678.90</xquery-result> <xslt-result>12,345,678.90</xslt-result> </test> <test> <code>local:format-number(-12345678.9, '#,###.00')</code> <xquery-result>-12,345,678.90</xquery-result> <xslt-result>-12,345,678.90</xslt-result> </test> <test> <code>local:format-number(12345.67,'00000000.00')</code> <xquery-result>00012345.67</xquery-result> <xslt-result>00012345.67</xslt-result> </test> <test> <code>local:format-number(12345.67,'0,000.0000;-000,000.00')</code> <xquery-result>12,345.6700</xquery-result> <xslt-result>12,345.6700</xslt-result> </test> <test> <code>local:format-number(-12345.67,'0,000.0000;-000,000.00')</code> <xquery-result>-012,345.67</xquery-result> <xslt-result>-012,345.67</xslt-result> </test> <test> <code>local:format-number(12345.67,',000')</code> <xquery-result>12,346</xquery-result> <xslt-result>12,346</xslt-result> </test> <test> <code>local:format-number(12345.67,'$,000')</code> <xquery-result>$12,346</xquery-result> <xslt-result>$12,346</xslt-result> </test> </tests> |
This is far from being a complete solution; there are several patterns that are not supported at all; but it’s getting better… As I commented here I do believe that format-number needs to become part of the XQuery language and natively supported by the engine, which is the direction where XQuery 1.1 is moving.
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I tested both versions of the format function (formatnumber-xquery.xq and format-number.xquery) using a variety of masks like “#,##0.00″. For a value of -700.00, the result formats like “-,700.00″.
Good catch; the updated attached version fixes that problem and adds two tests to check that behavior.
Minollo – so sorry I missed this update – in place now in the Wikibook – you should have updated the book yourself