Counterintuitive result in NumberFormat of Intl Package in Dart/Flutter

Question

Why does NumberFormat(".##").format(17.46) leads to a string of 17.46 and not .46?

How can I achieve the latter, i.e. remove all digits in front of the decimal sign?

Answer 1

The NumberFormat only changes the way that a number is being displayed(basically, what formatting is). So you can't get the fractional part of the number(it doesn't work like pattern matching). Instead, you can use:

var num = 17.46;
var fraction = num.toString().split('.')[1];

Note: you can use '.' + num.toString().split('.')[1] to get the fraction part with the starting dot.

You can read more about the ICU Formatting that NumberFormat uses in this link.