Currency and amount display

I agree that CurrencyLocale makes much more sense than CurrencyLanguage for our purposes.

Also, have we thought about using PHP's intl extension? http://www.php.net/manual/en/numberformatter.formatcurrency.php

Even if we decide against it because of it's requirements (php 5.3 / php 5.2 as a pecl extension), we can still use it by default if it's enabled and switch to our implementation if not, that should save some cpu cycles :)

Edit: In order to be as performant as possible (e.g. don't include our implementation class on each page load) we could use ctools plugins for this task. Ctools is already a dependency for the currency exportability feature.

The LDML spec of interest is: http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr35/#Currencies

Question from the previous thread: "but how does one display the euro to an Argentine audience?"

Great question. And it is not one I can answer! This is a common currency, so you would get away with using the standard symbol ;) An Asian or Arabic symbol would be completely foreign here though. Should we just insert the native symbol in the native format, the native symbol with the format in the users locale, or convert to a format in the users locale....

My gut feel is to just to create an English format for the string and symbol. Then make this translatable via the i18n module. So each currency has a base, and this is translatable via i18n. I would think that it would be easy to script the money_format() function to get a base list of formats. This function actually drops the symbol for an abbreviation of the currency.

"iso3","name","plural","symbol","format","minor_unit_precision"
"CAD","Canadian dollar","Canadian dollars","$","-¤#,##0.00","2"

A French translation could specify the alternative format, an Arabic translation could specify both a different format / symbol.

Firstly, decide if you want to cover the finer details discussed here. If so, then ping Gábor Hojtsy or Florian Weber (webflo) for advice on the best way forward.

In regards to the format, it is an unusual character, but it is the international symbol for this task. However, I think that I only parsed about 17 distinct formats from the XML dumps from www.unicode.org. So maybe it is an option to collect up all of the distinct formats, extend these with a few extras, like corresponding minus and bracket pairs, [-¤#,##0.00 and (¤#,##0.00)] and actually provide a finite list of formats to choose from via a select list. When displaying the list, these could be parsed into a real number, like date formats, with say -1234567.890 as the base.

$options = array(
  '-¤#,##0' => '-$1,234,567',
  '-¤#,##0.00' => '-$1,234,567.89',
  '-¤#,##0.000' => '-$1,234,567.890',
  '(¤#,##0)' => '($1,234,567)'
  '(¤#,##0.00)' => '($1,234,567.89)'
  '(¤#,##0.000)' => '($1,234,567.890)'
);

Cross-post :)