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Java provides a good way to format currencies using major symbols depending on a given locale. For example, if the given currency is US dollar, then you can achieve $0.35 or USD0.35 for US and UK locales respectively. That's really fine.

Nevertheless, in some cases, there is need to format money amounts in another, I would say more user-friendly, style using minor currency symbols. For example, 35¢ or 35c instead of the examples above. Wikipedia also says:

Cent amounts from 1 cent to 99 cents can be represented as one or two digits followed by the appropriate abbreviation (2¢, 5¢, 75¢, 99¢)

However, I can't find any way to format money amounts in this style using JDK. I've already tried to play with DecimalFormatSymbols, but this only allows to configure the major currency symbol, so DecimalFormat still uses the original format, giving something like ¢35 which is not fine. Also a custom format string to fix the order may not be a locale/language/country-agnostic (in-between space? prefix or suffix notation?). Joda Money and its MoneyFormatter seem to lack this feature as well.

Is there a good way to format money amounts using minor currency symbols? Thanks in advance.

P.S. I'm not sure if words "major" and "minor" suit here well.

Lyubomyr Shaydariv
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  • http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13341925/how-can-i-find-out-the-currency-sub-unit-aka-minor-unit-symbol-in-java – assylias Jan 06 '14 at 12:45
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    Is this really "better"? I personally wouldn't waste anytime on this. `$0.02` is perfectly legible to me. Also, consider a list of values some in the normal format, some as cents - it would make them harder to instantly compare – Bohemian Jan 06 '14 at 12:47
  • @Bohemian hm, yes, you're right about comparison. That's a good point, thanks. However, there are cases when no comparison is intended per se, and the price should be simply displayed. – Lyubomyr Shaydariv Jan 06 '14 at 13:16
  • @assylias sorry, but that question doesn't have an answer for what I'm looking for. – Lyubomyr Shaydariv Jan 06 '14 at 23:06

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I honestly think that the best thing to do here, if you really need the minor currencies, is to do your own parsing of the information into strings. If need be, you could even make your own money class with different methods that output strings or whatever you would like! You will have to evaluate your situation and determine if its really worth the custom output though. :)

Drifter64
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