12.1. Price pictures

You may have noticed that the product prices aren't formatted as prices usually are. The way to correct this is with an Interchange feature called price pictures.

There are several properties to price pictures: the currency symbol, the thousands separator, the decimal point, the number of digits to show behind the decimal, and so on. Most Unix systems have U.S. currency and the English language as the default locale, which is called en_US. The only thing you need to do on such a system is specify the currency symbol, which, in this case, is the dollar sign. To do this, add the following line to your catalog.cfg file:

  Locale en_US currency_symbol $

Restart Interchange and view your catalog. You will notice little has changed on the welcome page or the flypages, but in the shopping cart all your prices should be formatted as U.S. dollars ("1347.3" has become "$1,347.30"). This is because Interchange automatically formats shopping cart prices as currency. To turn off this feature, you would have to change the [item-price] tag to [item-price noformat] in pages/ord/basket.html.

But that's probably not what you want to do. You're probably more interested in formatting your other prices as currency. To do that, simply use the [currency] [/currency] tag pair for all price values. Make the following change to pages/index.html:

  [loop search="ra=yes/fi=products"]
  <tr>
  <td>[loop-code]</td>
  <td>[loop-field description]</td>
- <td align=right>[loop-field price]</td>
+ <td align=right>[currency][loop-field price][/currency]</td>
  </tr>
  [/loop]


Note: The line that begins with '-' should be deleted. Do not type the '-'. The next line, that starts with '+', replaces it.

A similar change to the [item-field price] tag in the pages/flypage.html page will fix that currency display. View the page in your browser. All your prices should be formatted for U.S. currency.

If your prices are not being formatted correctly, your default system locale may be set up differently or your en_US locale settings may be wrong. There are a few other catalog.cfg directives you can use to correct the situation:

  Locale en_US p_cs_precedes 1

Makes the currency symbol precede the currency value. A '0' setting makes the symbol come after the currency value.

  Locale en_US mon_thousands_sep ,

Sets your thousands separator to a comma. It can be set to any value.

  Locale en_US mon_decimal_point .

Sets your decimal separator to a comma. Many countries use a comma instead of a period to separate the integer from the decimal part.


Note: Consult the Interchange documentation and your operating system manual for more information on locale settings.