31st July 2008 - 5 minutes read time
I found a good function that details how to format numbers with commas in JavaScript and thought I would reproduce it here. It basically takes any number and turns it into formatted string with the thousands separated by commas. The number_format() function is available in PHP and I have been relying on PHP to sort out the formatting before returning it via an AJAX call. I can now include this function into my JavaScript library and do this on the client side.
The function works by using regular expressions to first split the string into whole number and decimal, before splitting the number by groups of three digits.
The regular expression used is (\d+)(\d{3}), which looks for a sequence of three numbers preceded by any numbers. This is a little trick that causes the regular expression engine to work from right to left, instead of left to right.
