Abbreviated numbers

Soluling home Document home

Showing big numbers to a user might have problems. The first one is that they tend to be hard to read, especially when the digits get longer than 5. In addition, a long number takes space that might be limited. To avoid these issues, we can use abbreviated numbers. The following table contains some numbers and their abbreviated versions in English, Finnish, and Japanese:

Number	English short	English long	Finnish short	Finnish long	Japanese
19	19	19	19	19	19
1000	1K	1 thousand	1 t.	1 tuhat	1000
25000	25K	25 thousand	25 t.	25 tuhatta	2.5万
1 200 000	1.2M	1.2 million	1,2 milj.	1,2 miljoonaa	120万
34 000 000	34M	34 million	34 milj.	34 miljoonaa	3400万
2 000 000 000	2G	2 billion	2 mrd.	2 miljardia	20億

As you can see, the abbreviate rules differ a lot, depending on the language. Some cultures use 1000 as a separator (used in Europe), some cultures use 10 000 (e.g., Japan). Some languages use single-letter abbreviations, and some use longer.

AbbreviatedNumber.Format(form, number): string;

It takes two parameters: form (short or long abbreviation) and number, and returns a string.

Platforms

Hardly any platform contains built-in support for abbreviated numbers. Most platforms require that you use our custom API. The API source code is available in GitHub. The following table shows how various platforms support the ordinal numbers:

Platforms	Status	APIs	Samples
.NET Standard	yes	<data-dir>\Library\NET\Number.cs	<data-dir>\Samples\ASP.NET\Number <data-dir>\Samples\WindowsForms\Number <data-dir>\Samples\WPF\Number <data-dir>\Samples\UWP\Number
Android	yes	<data-dir>\Library\Java\Number.java
Angular	yes	<data-dir>\Library\Angular\number.pipe.ts	<data-dir>\Samples\Angular\Number
Delphi	yes	<data-dir>\Library\Delphi\NtNumber.pas	<data-dir>\Samples\Delphi\VCL\Number <data-dir>\Samples\Delphi\FMX\Number
Java	yes	<data-dir>\Library\Java\Number.java
JavaScript	yes	<data-dir>\Library\JavaScript\number.js
TypeScript	yes	<data-dir>\Library\TypeScript\number.ts	See the Angular sample

yes means that we have implemented an open-source API. To use it, include the API file in your project. The samples in <data-dir>\Samples\<platform> show how to use the API.

built-in means that the standard API of the platform supports the feature. The platforms that use ICU MessageFormat, such as Angular, Flutter, React Intl, and svelte-i18n, support the same plural, select, and nested patterns as Soluling's API. Other platforms support plurals and sometimes genders, but not select or multiple parameters. If neither the platform nor our APIs support a feature, you can write your own API based on one of ours.