Best way to convert string to decimal separator "." and "," insensitive way?

Question

Application deals with strings that represent decimals that come from different cultures. For example "1.1 and "1,1" is the same value.

I played with Decimal.TryParse flags combinations but couldn't achieve the result I want. "1,1" became "11" or "0" after all.

Is it possible to convert such strings to decimal in one line of code without pre-replacing "," char to "." or playing with NumberFormat.NumberDecimalSeparator ?

How do you handle such situations?

Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

You can create a temporary CultureInfo object to use when you parse.

// get a temporary culture (clone) to modify
var ci = CultureInfo.InvariantCulture.Clone() as CultureInfo;
ci.NumberFormat.NumberDecimalSeparator = ",";
decimal number = decimal.Parse("1,1", ci); // 1.1

Answer 2

I found another way to do it. It looks odd but it works fine for me.

So if you don't know culture of the target system and you don't know which value you will get like 12.33 or 12,33 you can do following

string amount = "12.33";
// or i.e. string amount = "12,33";

var c = System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture;
var s = c.NumberFormat.CurrencyDecimalSeparator;

amount = amount.Replace(",", s);
amount = amount.Replace(".", s);

decimal transactionAmount = Convert.ToDecimal(amount); 

Answer 3

You just need to have the correct culture set, when calling Parse, like so:

string s = "11,20";

decimal c1 = decimal.Parse(s, new CultureInfo("fr-FR"));
decimal c2 = decimal.Parse(s, new CultureInfo("en-AU"));

Console.WriteLine(c1);
Console.WriteLine(c2);