Which data type to use for manipulating currency

Question

I am trying to decide which data type shall i use for a financial application.

I have read that Double or BigDecimal should be used. And i am confused between them. Any help in this regard will be highly appreciated

score 9 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 07 '13 at 16:53

You almost certainly don't want to use floating-point types (double, float, Double, Float) to handle monetary amounts, especially if you will be performing computations on them. The main reason for this is that there are many simple-looking numbers that cannot be represented exactly as a double et al. One such number is 0.1.

BigDecimal is therefore a much better choice for this use case.

score 2 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:53

2

Use BigDecimal, it's a lot better than Double for financial stuff. See here the accepted answer for a similar question: Double vs. BigDecimal?

edited May 23 '17 at 11:53

Community

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answered Apr 07 '13 at 16:52

user998692

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1ac0 · Answer 3 · 2014-06-07T12:19:34.057

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BigDecimal isn't only best choice, BigDecimal is designed for such case.

edited Jun 07 '14 at 12:19

answered Apr 07 '13 at 16:56

1ac0

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score 2 · Answer 4 · answered Apr 07 '13 at 17:29

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For most applications, a simple long will do: when representing cents, this will handle amounts up to 10^17 {Dollars, Euros, whatever}.

answered Apr 07 '13 at 17:29

Gyro Gearless

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Which data type to use for manipulating currency

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