Any way to get Currency Names List and map them to Currency Symbols?

Question

I have C# code which can generate a list like this, using Cultures (link):

AUD $ 
CAD $ 
EUR € 
GBP £ 
JPY ¥ 
USD $

What I want is a list like this too:

Australian Dollar
Canadian Dollar
Euro
British Pound
Japanese Yen
United States Dollar

What I actually want is that there should be a drop-down style Winforms Combobox, from which the user selects the currency, such as British Pound, and then through a function or something, GBP or £ gets returned. This will help me parse the currency value the user might type in the adjacent currency value text box.

So can I use Cultures (or something else which does not require an Internet connection) to get a descriptive Currency Names list ?

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 11 '17 at 21:01

If you're using the full .NET Framework,* you can fetch the unique currencies by enumerating through the CultureInfo instances and creating the related RegionInfo by LCID. You can then return the relevant currency fields from RegionInfo, namely, ISOCurrencySymbol, CurrencyEnglishName, and CurrencySymbol.

For example, the following code will return the distinct ISOCurrencySymbol along with the associated name and symbol.

var currencies = CultureInfo.GetCultures(CultureTypes.SpecificCultures)
    .Select(ci => ci.LCID).Distinct()
    .Select(id => new RegionInfo(id))
    .GroupBy(r => r.ISOCurrencySymbol)
    .Select(g => g.First())
    .Select(r => new
    {
        r.ISOCurrencySymbol,
        r.CurrencyEnglishName,
        r.CurrencySymbol,
    });

For the ISO Symbols provided in the original question, the following information would be returned:

AUD, $, Australian Dollar
CAD, $, Canadian Dollar
EUR, ?, Euro
GBP, £, British Pound
JPY, ¥, Japanese Yen
USD, $, US Dollar

Note: RegionInfo.CurrencyNativeName also exists, but it will provide the currency name in the native language of the given region. Thus, the same ISOCurrencySymbol may have various instances of CurrencyNativeName associated with it and would not prove useful for mapping in this scenario.

* .NET Core does not appear to support enumerating CultureInfo.

.NET Core 2.0 now supports enumerating CultureInfo: https://stackoverflow.com/a/44434430/77779 — Yishai, Jul 04 '19 at 16:24

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 11 '13 at 11:06

In my opinion the easiest way to accomplish this would be to create a wrapper class for the Currency, something like this:

public class Currency
{
   public string Code { get; set; }  // USD
   public string Name { get; set; }  // United States Dollar
   public string Symbol { get; set; } // $
}

You can create a collection of these classes and set Name as a member to display in your combobox. After the user selects some value, you can easily use Linq for instance to get the correspondent class.

Any way to get Currency Names List and map them to Currency Symbols?

2 Answers2