Formatting currencies with Intl.NumberFormat

Do you know the Intl object in Javascript?

This namespace stands for the ECMAScript's internationalization API, and provides some nice features such as string comparison, and number, date and time formatting. With this post I'll show about currency formatting using the NumberFormat constructor.

Recently I had to format integers to a currency format and I had 2 options:

• Do it myself (which I'm a huge fan of)
• Use some external library

But this time was different, and I took some time to search about the topic and then I found Intl.NumberFormat. It's usage is simple, here's an example:

const reaisFormatter = new Intl.NumberFormat('pt-BR', {
  style: 'currency',
  currency: 'BRL'
})

reaisFormatter.format(123.50) // R$ 123,50

And that was it. Simple, huh? And within the NumberFormat constructor you have an infinity of possibilities, such as unit formatting (liters, centimeters, foot...), percentage, decimal formatting and so on.

Perheps you don't need to npm install something to do that anymore. Hope you enjoyed it!