Problem with Japanese abbreviations.

(moved from foretagsplatsen/Numeral-js/issues/9)

I’ve already reported this issue here adamwdraper/Numeral-js/issues/248, but as the original branch is not maintained anymore, I think it would be better to focus on your branch.

Now, Numeral.js is grouping numbers into 4 groups: thousands, milions, billions and trillions.

But, in case of Japanese (and I suppose it also applies to Chinese) numbers are grouped in slightly different way: every hundred, thousand and ten thousand.

100 -> 1百
1,000 -> 1千
10,000 -> 1万
100,000 -> 10万
1,000,000 -> 1百万
10,000,000 -> 1千万
100,000,000 -> 1億

Before I start fixing this issue, I’d like to discuss how to approach that problem. Ideas:

• add more abbreviations in library core
• let languages define their own formatting/unformatting functions

Sample formatting function here: http://jsfiddle.net/tuknLbz8/1/

Anyway, I think we need more flexible architecture if we want to support even more complicated numeral systems like Indian numbering system.

[ghost]

@BenjaminVanRyseghem I would like to helping with this issue. But I think OP is not how a large numeric should be display.

Let’s see what it should be look like:

Powers of 10	Number	English	Japanese
1	10	10	10
2	100	100	100
3	1,000	1k	1,000
4	10,000	10k	1万
5	100,000	100k	10万
6	1,000,000	1m	100万
7	10,000,000	10m	1,000万
8	100,000,000	100m	1億
9	1,000,000,000	1b	10億
10	100,000,000,000	100b	100億
12	1,000,000,000,000	1tr	1兆

This is more reasonable and I think is easier to implement. Since the only different of these two system is how we separate large number (that means, >= 1,000), the problem of “百” or “1百” doesn’t exist. Japanese numeric system (which is the same as Chinese), are based on 10^4, while western system are based on 10^3.

I have found this web page might help: https://www.trussel.com/jnumbers.htm

When the OP mentions we should write “100” as “百”, it just like saying we should write “1 hundred” in English, doesn’t make sense. Because it is how we read the number, not how we write them.

[BenjaminVanRyseghem]

@ArmorDarks I would like to keep locales out of the format string