A question about formatNumber and decimal places

I'm printing currency values to the screen using <fmt:formatNumber>. If my numeric value has a non-zero fractional part I want exactly two decimal places. If the fractional part is zero I want the decimal places omitted.

so 45.75 prints as $45.75
but 201.00 prints as $201

How can I do that?

So that means that 18.30 should print as $18.30 and not as $18.3? In that case I think you're going to need two different formatters and some kind if-then-else to distinguish the two cases. Writing a custom tag might be the right way to go here.

Why two formatters? What are the two cases? I only see one.

No custom tag is necessary, the <fmt:formatNumber> tag should do just fine.

But the OP hasn't shown that any effort has been put into the problem yet. What formats have been tried that aren't working?

Thomas Kennedy wrote:If my numeric value has a non-zero fractional part I want exactly two decimal places.

If the fractional part is zero I want the decimal places omitted.

These are the two cases I saw. I don't see how to implement that with a single DecimalFormat.

Ah. I thought that no-trailing was an undesirable outcome.

In that case, I'd simply use the ternary operator to choose between the two patterns.

Is there anything in the fn library that can perform decision in a robust way? All I can think of is to check if the String representation of the value ends with ".00", and that sounds ugly. BTW does Oracle have a documentation page for EL? Thank you.

Expression Language Specification Version 2.1

And no, there isn't an EL function in the fn: namespace which does that. But you don't need one, either. One of the EL operators is sufficient.

What type is the numeric value? How would you test it in a Java expression to see if it were a whole number or not?

In Java I would use Math.round() to compare the value to itself. So I could step out to a scriptlet but would prefer to avoid that.

OK, so let's say you've been forbidden to use the Math class. How would you do with basic operators?