How do I display a decimal value to 2 decimal places?

Question

When displaying the value of a decimal currently with .ToString(), it\'s accurate to like 15 decimal places, and since I\'m using it to represent dollars and ce

Answer 1

There's already two high scoring answers that refer to Decimal.Round(...) but I think a little more explanation is needed - because there's an unexpected important property of Decimal that isn't obvious.

A Decimal 'knows' how many decimal places it has based upon where it came from

For instance the following may be unexpected :

Decimal.Parse("25").ToString()          =>   "25"
Decimal.Parse("25.").ToString()         =>   "25"
Decimal.Parse("25.0").ToString()        =>   "25.0"
Decimal.Parse("25.0000").ToString()     =>   "25.0000"

25m.ToString()                          =>   "25"
25.000m.ToString()                      =>   "25.000"

Doing the same operations with Double will give no decimal places ("25") for each of the above.

When you want a decimal to 2 decimal places theres about a 95% chance it's because it's currency in which case this is probably fine for 95% of the time:

Decimal.Parse("25.0").ToString("c")     =>   "$25.00"

Or in XAML you just use {Binding Price, StringFormat=c}

One case I ran into where I needed a decimal AS a decimal was when sending XML to Amazon's webservice. The service was complaining because a Decimal value (originally from SQL Server) was being sent as 25.1200 and rejected, (25.12 was the expected format).

All I needed to do was Decimal.Round(...) with 2 decimal places to fix the problem.

 // This is an XML message - with generated code by XSD.exe
 StandardPrice = new OverrideCurrencyAmount()
 {
       TypedValue = Decimal.Round(product.StandardPrice, 2),
       currency = "USD"
 }

TypedValue is of type Decimal so I couldn't just do ToString("N2") and needed to round it and keep it as a decimal.