Using integers for currency

Question

I'm writing a program, using seam and an SQL database, that stores information about employees. I was told to store the pay as ints in the database. When the user enters the pay, it is stored as a String and when I use a setter for the employee object it turns it into an int. My problem is that I can't figure out how to store it back in the string with the decimal back in place. Any ideas?

The `int` should be "the number of cents," no? – Louis Wasserman May 31 '12 at 12:56 — Louis Wasserman, May 31 '12 at 12:56
Yes. The int would be the floating point number * 100 – user1423793 May 31 '12 at 13:00 — user1423793, May 31 '12 at 13:00

Louis Wasserman · Answer 1 · 2012-05-31T13:09:28.810

The simplest thing that will definitely work in general is probably

BigDecimal.valueOf(cents).scaleByPowerOfTen(-2).toString();

(This has the advantage of generalizing to long or BigInteger numbers of cents, in a pinch.)

The other solution that would definitely work, although it's slightly more complicated, would be something along the lines of

return Integer.toString(cents / 100)
     + "."
     + new DecimalFormat("00").format(cents % 100);

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered May 31 '12 at 12:59

0

if it is stored as number of cents, format it to a float and then divide it by 100.

answered May 31 '12 at 12:59

Tikkes

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I would use double (15 digits of accuracy) rather than float (6 digits of accuracy) – Peter Lawrey May 31 '12 at 13:02
It's very bad idea to use float or double for monetary calculations because you could lose precision! Please read this article about this problem - https://dzone.com/articles/never-use-float-and-double-for-monetary-calculatio – SavinI Jan 24 '20 at 04:47

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered May 31 '12 at 13:03

0

You can use something like.

int priceInCents = ...
String price = String.format("%.2f", priceInCents / 100.0);

answered May 31 '12 at 13:03

Peter Lawrey

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score 0 · Answer 4 · answered May 31 '12 at 13:22

Would something like this be what you are looking for?

class Currency {
  int cents;

  public Currency(int cents) {
    this.cents = cents;
  }

  public Currency(String cents) {
    this(Integer.parseInt(cents));
  }

  public int getCents(){
    return cents;
  }

  public double getValue(){
    return cents/100.0d;
  }

  private static final DecimalFormat o = new DecimalFormat("0");
  private static final DecimalFormat oo = new DecimalFormat("00");

  @Override
  public String toString() {
    return o.format(cents / 100) + "." + oo.format(cents % 100);
  }
}

Thank you guys for all your responses. I have figured it out now. — user1423793, May 31 '12 at 14:08

Using integers for currency

4 Answers4