Extract currency from formatted amount

Question

I'm getting a formatted amount of money from a web service. It can be in different formats and using different currencies, e.g.

• $ 1.10
• € 1,10
• 1,10 €
• EUR 1.10 (perhaps, I'm not sure I'll actually encounter this one)

I would like to extract the currency symbol ($) from it, and if possible get the associated Currency object (Java) from that symbol. I don't need to extract the amount, I can get that somewhere else.

Answer 1

you can use a regular expression, to parse your result from the webservice. You have to filter all characters, except numbers, dots and whitespaces. Here is the regex for that:

String regexp = "[^0-9\\.,\\s]*";

The first group of the matching result is the currency symbol (or the name e.g. EUR).

Here is my sample method:

public void test() throws Exception {
    String text = "2.02 $";
    String regexp = "[^0-9\\.,\\s]*";
    Pattern p = Pattern.compile(regexp);
    Matcher m = p.matcher(text);
    while (m.find()) {
        for (int i = 0; i < m.groupCount() + 1; i++)
            LOG.info(m.group(i));
    }
}