How can I parse a string with a comma thousand separator to a number?

On modern browsers you can use the built in Intl.NumberFormat to detect the browser's number formatting and normalize the input to match.

function parseNumber(value, locales = navigator.languages) {
  const example = Intl.NumberFormat(locales).format('1.1');
  const cleanPattern = new RegExp(`[^-+0-9${ example.charAt( 1 ) }]`, 'g');
  const cleaned = value.replace(cleanPattern, '');
  const normalized = cleaned.replace(example.charAt(1), '.');

  return parseFloat(normalized);
}

const corpus = {
  '1.123': {
    expected: 1.123,
    locale: 'en-US'
  },
  '1,123': {
    expected: 1123,
    locale: 'en-US'
  },
  '2.123': {
    expected: 2123,
    locale: 'fr-FR'
  },
  '2,123': {
    expected: 2.123,
    locale: 'fr-FR'
  },
}


for (const candidate in corpus) {
  const {
    locale,
    expected
  } = corpus[candidate];
  const parsed = parseNumber(candidate, locale);

  console.log(`${ candidate } in ${ corpus[ candidate ].locale } == ${ expected }? ${ parsed === expected }`);
}

Their's obviously room for some optimization and caching but this works reliably in all languages.


Yes remove the commas:

let output = parseFloat("2,299.00".replace(/,/g, ''));
console.log(output);

Removing commas is potentially dangerous because, as others have mentioned in the comments, many locales use a comma to mean something different (like a decimal place).

I don't know where you got your string from, but in some places in the world "2,299.00" = 2.299

The Intl object could have been a nice way to tackle this problem, but somehow they managed to ship the spec with only a Intl.NumberFormat.format() API and no parse counterpart :(

The only way to parse a string with cultural numeric characters in it to a machine recognisable number in any i18n sane way is to use a library that leverages CLDR data to cover off all possible ways of formatting number strings http://cldr.unicode.org/

The two best JS options I've come across for this so far:

  • https://github.com/google/closure-library/tree/master/closure/goog/i18n
  • https://github.com/globalizejs/globalize