Handling international currency input in Ruby on Rails

Question

I have an application that handles currency inputs. However, if you\'re in the US, you might enter a number as 12,345.67; in France, it might be 12.345,67

Answer 1

We wrote this:

class String
  def safe_parse
    self.gsub(I18n.t("number.currency.format.unit"), '').gsub(I18n.t("number.currency.format.delimiter"), '').gsub(I18n.t("number.currency.format.separator"), '.').to_f
  end
end

Of course, you will have to set the I18n.locale before using this. And it currently only converts the string to a float for the locale that was set. (In our case, if the user is on the french site, we expect the currency amount text to only have symbols and formatting pertaining to the french locale).