Custom Compact Number Patterns with JDK 12 Compact Number Formatting

Dustin MarxJanuary 30th, 2019Last Updated: January 29th, 2019

0 111 3 minutes read

The post “Compact Number Formatting Comes to JDK 12” has been the subject of discussion on a java subreddit thread. Concerns expressed in that thread related to presentation of the compact number formatting deal with digits of precision displayed and the compact number patterns displayed. The digits of precision can be addressed via use of CompactNumberFormat.setMinimumFractionDigits(int) and this approach is discussed in more detail in the post “Using Minimum Fractional Digits with JDK 12 Compact Number Formatting.” The second issue (dislike for the compact patterns used in the pre-built CompactNumberFormat instances for certain languages) is addressed in this post.

As far as I can determine (and I certainly could be missing something), there’s no method on CompactNumberFormat that allows for the compact number patterns to be set on an existing instance of CompactNumberFormat. However, if the constructor for CompactNumberFormat is used to obtain an instance of this class (rather than using one of the overloaded static factory methods on NumberFormat), then the compact number patterns can be supplied via that constructor to the new instance of CompactNumberFormat. This is demonstrated in the next code listing (also available on GitHub).

/**
 * Provides an instance of {@code CompactNumberFormat} that has been
 * custom created via that class's constructor and represents an
 * alternate Germany German representation to that provided by an
 * instance of {@code CompactNumberFormat} obtained via the static
 * factory methods of {@code NumberFormat} for {@code Locale.GERMANY}.
 *
 * @return Instance of {@code CompactNumberFormat} with customized
 *    alternate German compact pattern representations.
 */
private static CompactNumberFormat generateCustomizedGermanCompactNumberFormat()
{
   final String[] germanyGermanCompactPatterns
      = {"", "", "", "0k", "00k", "000k", "0m", "00m", "000m", "0b", "00b", "000b", "0t", "00t", "000t"};
   final DecimalFormat germanyGermanDecimalFormat
      = acquireDecimalFormat(Locale.GERMANY);
   final CompactNumberFormat customGermanCompactNumberFormat
      = new CompactNumberFormat(
         germanyGermanDecimalFormat.toPattern(),
         germanyGermanDecimalFormat.getDecimalFormatSymbols(),
         germanyGermanCompactPatterns);
   return customGermanCompactNumberFormat;
}

There are three items worth special emphasis in the above code listing:

The CompactNumberFormat(String, DecimalFormatSymbols, String[]) constructor allows for an array of Strings to be passed to the instance to specify the compact number patterns.
The nature of the String[] defining compact number patterns is defined in the Javadoc for CompactNumberFormat class, which states, “The compact number patterns are represented in a series of patterns where each pattern is used to format a range of numbers.”
- That same Javadoc provides a US locale based example that provides these values for the range 10⁰ to 10¹⁴ and it was that example that I adapted here.
- More or fewer than 15 patterns can be supplied, but the first supplied pattern always corresponds to 10⁰. The Javadoc states, “There can be any number of patterns and they are strictly index based starting from the range 10⁰.”
- For demonstration purposes here, I adapted the patterns from an observation on the subreddit thread referenced earlier. I don’t know much about German, but the argument for SI-based suffixes made a lot of sense and this is merely for illustrative purposes anyway.
In this example, I retrieved the other two arguments to the CompactNumberFormat constructor from a JDK-provided instance of DecimalFormat for Germany German locale (Locale.GERMANY). This ensured that the decimal pattern and decimal format symbols of my custom Germany German instance of CompactNumberFormat would be the same as those associated with the JDK-provided instance.

The code listing above showed a call to a method called acquireDecimalFormat(Locale) to get a JDK-provided instance of DecimalFormat for Locale.GERMANY. For completeness, that method is shown next.

/**
 * Provides an instance of {@code DecimalFormat} associated with
 * the provided instance of {@code Locale}.
 *
 * @param locale Locale for which an instance of {@code DecimalFormat}
 *    is desired.
 * @return Instance of {@code DecimalFormat} corresponding to the
 *    provided {@code Locale}.
 * @throws ClassCastException Thrown if I'm unable to acquire a
 *    {@code DecimalFormat} instance from the static factory method
 *    on class {@code NumberFormat} (the approach recommended in the
 *    class-level Javadoc for {@code DecimalFormat}).
 */
private static DecimalFormat acquireDecimalFormat(final Locale locale)
{
   final NumberFormat generalGermanyGermanFormat
      = NumberFormat.getInstance(locale);
   if (generalGermanyGermanFormat instanceof DecimalFormat)
   {
      return (DecimalFormat) generalGermanyGermanFormat;
   }
   throw new ClassCastException(
        "Unable to acquire DecimalFormat in recommended manner;"
      + " presented with NumberFormat type of '"
      + generalGermanyGermanFormat.getClass().getSimpleName()
      + "' instead.");
}

The code snippets shown above demonstrate how the compact number patterns can be customized for a given instance of CompactNumberFormat when the compact number patterns associated in instances of that class for a given Locale are not desirable. It’d be nice if there was a method on the CompactNumberFormat class to allow for overriding of some or all of the compact number patterns associated with an existing instance obtained via NumberFormat static factory class, but JDK 12 has entered rampdown phase 2.

Published on Java Code Geeks with permission by Dustin Marx, partner at our JCG program. See the original article here: Custom Compact Number Patterns with JDK 12 Compact Number Formatting

Opinions expressed by Java Code Geeks contributors are their own.