Re: Quick note about future number handling

Saturday, March 20, 2010, 2:33:18 AM, Brian Pontarelli wrote:

> I've run into issues over the past 4 years due to the default
> number handling in templates.  The problem is regarding the
> difference between ${n} and ${n?c} and it has consistently been an issue.
>
> The problem is that testing generally doesn't find issues until
> database and other IDs exceed 1000 and FreeMarker begins to insert commas such as:
>
>         1,020
>
> This generally occurs when the template is creating URLs or form
> fields that should contain integer values such as IDs. When the
> value is sent to the server via HTTP, it contains a comma and that
> breaks the Integer.parseInt() methods parsing.
>
> I would suggest a change with the first backwards-incompatible
> release that changes the handling. The default handling should be to
> print out the number with no formatting in the same way that Java
> does. If you want to format it, you should need to do so explicitly,
> in the same way that java does. Here's the change for n = 1000:
>
>         ${n} = 1000
>         ${n?string("#,###.##")} = 1,000

Or rather ${n?h} (h for Human audience) or something... Anyway, I
agree that this is a big problem. In any new language I surely would
use a ?c-ish formatting as the default. Doing such a change in FTL,
however, would be a quite brutal change, as there is not even
semi-automatic way to revisit existing templates for this. But
certainly it needs to be done regardless.

> I know there are a number of ideas floating about for an
> incompatible release (possibly 3.0) and I would like to toss this
> one in there.
>
> -bp
>
>
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-- 
Best regards,
 Daniel Dekany


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