How do I format a C# decimal to remove extra following 0's?

Question

I want to format a string as a decimal, but the decimal contains some following zeros after the decimal. How do I format it such that those meaningless 0\'s disappear?

Answer 1

They're not necessarily meaningless - they indicate the precision during calculation. Decimals maintain their precision level, rather than being normalized.

I have some code in this answer which will return a normalized value - you could use that, and then format the result. For example:

using System;
using System.Numerics;

class Test
{
    static void Display(decimal d)
    {
        d = d.Normalize(); // Using extension method from other post
        Console.WriteLine(d);
    }

    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        Display(123.4567890000m); // Prints 123.456789
        Display(123.100m);        // Prints 123.1
        Display(123.000m);        // Prints 123
        Display(123.4567891234m); // Prints 123.4567891234
    }
}

I suspect that most of the format string approaches will fail. I would guess that a format string of "0." and then 28 # characters would work, but it would be very ugly...