Lua - Format integer

Question

i\'d like to format a number to look as follows \"1,234\" or \"1,234,432\" or \"123,456,789\", you get the idea. I tried doing this as follows;

function ref         


        

Answer 1

Well, let's take this from the top down. First of all, it's failing because you've got a reference error:

    ...
        for k = 1, 3 do
            newint = string.sub(mystring, -k*v) -- What is 'mystring'?
        end
    ...

Most likely you want i to be there, not mystring.

Second, while replacing mystring with i will fix the errors, it still won't work correctly.

> =reformatint(100)
,100
> =reformatint(1)
,000

That's obviously not right. It seems like what you're trying to do is go through the string, and build up the new string with the commas added. But there are a couple of problems...

function reformatint(i)
    local length = string.len(i)
    for v = 1, math.floor(length/3) do
        for k = 1, 3 do -- What is this inner loop for?
            newint = string.sub(mystring, -k*v) -- This chops off the end of
                                                -- your string only
        end
        newint = ','..newint -- This will make your result have a ',' at
                             -- the beginning, no matter what
    end
    return newint
end

With some rework, you can get a function that work.

function reformatint(integer)
    for i = 1, math.floor((string.len(integer)-1) / 3) do
        integer = string.sub(integer, 1, -3*i-i) ..
                  ',' ..
                  string.sub(integer, -3*i-i+1)
    end
    return integer
end

The function above seems to work correctly. However, it's fairly convoluted... Might want to make it more readable.

As a side note, a quick google search finds a function that has already been made for this:

function comma_value(amount)
  local formatted = amount
  while true do  
    formatted, k = string.gsub(formatted, "^(-?%d+)(%d%d%d)", '%1,%2')
    if (k==0) then
      break
    end
  end
  return formatted
end