How to format integers greater than 999 in python to look more readable?

Question

I have a bunch of numbers that I want to print to the user. Each number is greater than one million so I want to print it as 1.000.000 or 1,000,000 (any of these forms is valid to me). I want to know if is it possible to format integer numbers this way in python using the built-in formating utilities.

Answer 1

Use locale.format. You will need to setlocale first, since the formatting style is dependent on location (European countries typically use . instead of , for separating the digits, for instance).

>>> import locale
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, '')
'English_United Kingdom.1252'
>>> locale.format("%d", 1000000000, grouping=True)
'1,000,000,000'

LC_ALL sets the locale to the default, usually in the LANG environment variable.

Answer 2

In python 3.1 you can use the thousands format specifier:

>>> ',.2f'.format(1234567.89)
'1,234,567.89'