Alright, let’s talk about this ‘qian chinese’ thing I worked on recently. Wasn’t anything super complicated, really, just something that needed doing.
Getting Started
So, the task landed on my plate: make sure we show Chinese money correctly in the app. You know, the Yuan, or RMB, whatever you wanna call it. Just display prices and stuff with the right symbol and format. Easy peasy, I thought. Just slap a ‘¥’ symbol on it, right? Well, kinda.
The Actual Work
First thing, I grabbed the symbol. Just typed the Yen symbol on my keyboard. Looked okay. But then, I remembered sometimes there are different versions, like, the official one versus the easy keyboard one. Did a quick search. Found the proper Unicode character for the Yuan sign. Okay, step one, use the correct symbol. Little detail, but might as well do it right from the start.
Next up, the format. How do they write numbers in China? Like, 1,234.56 or 1234.56? I poked around a few big Chinese sites, shopping ones mostly. Seemed like they use commas sometimes, same as we do, for thousands. Sometimes they don’t. For displaying prices clearly, I figured using the comma separator was better. Less confusing for people maybe not used to long strings of numbers. So, decided to go with the 1,234.56 style.
Then I thought about the actual implementation.
- Could I find a library? Yeah, probably. There are big internationalization libraries out there.
- But honestly, for just one currency format? Seemed like bringing in a whole heavy library was overkill. Waste of space, more stuff to load.
- Decided, nah, I’ll just write a small helper function myself. Keep it simple.
So I did that. Took a number as input. Made sure it always had two decimal places, you know, for the fen part. Then tackled adding the commas. Most programming languages have some way to format numbers, or you can do it with a bit of string fiddling. Got that working. Finally, stuck the proper ‘¥’ symbol at the beginning.
Testing it out:
I threw a bunch of numbers at it:
- Simple ones like 100.
- Numbers with decimals like 99.99.
- Big numbers like 1234567.89.
- Zero. Gotta handle zero. Displayed as ¥0.00. Looked fine.
- Negative numbers? We didn’t really need it for prices, but maybe for account balances? Made it show -¥100.00. Seemed logical.
End Result
After coding that little function and testing it, I plugged it into the places where we show prices. It worked. Now it shows stuff like ¥1,234.56. Looks clean, uses the right symbol, formats it in a readable way. Didn’t take forever, but needed a bit more attention than just sticking a symbol on. Job done, moved on to the next thing. It’s usually these small details that take a bit of thinking.
