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Amit Merchant

Amit Merchant

A blog on PHP, JavaScript, and more

Convert long numbers to short and compact form in JavaScript

JavaScript amazes me everyday when I find something can be done using native JavaScript instead of using heavy-weight libraries or inventing my own functions.

Recently, I found one such thing. There’s an Intl object which is a standard built-in object in JavaScript that provides language sensitive string comparison, number formatting, and date and time formatting.

The Intl object provides access to several constructors as well as functionality common to the internationalization constructors and other language sensitive functions.

There is one such constructor called NumberFormat() which lets you do language-sensitive number formatting.

For instance, it lets you format a long number to its compact counterpart by providing notation: "compact" as an option like so.

new Intl.NumberFormat('en-GB', { 
    notation: "compact"
}).format(987654321);

// → 988M

new Intl.NumberFormat('en-GB', { 
    notation: "compact"
}).format(78656666589);

// → 79B

Or you can pass another option compactDisplay: "long" to get its more verbose format.

new Intl.NumberFormat(undefined, { 
    notation: "compact",
    compactDisplay: "long"
}).format(78656);

// → 79 thousand

You can choose not to supply locale if you’re not sure about it. You can specify undefined instead of a locale and it’d still work.

new Intl.NumberFormat(undefined, { 
    notation: "compact",
    compactDisplay: "long"
}).format(78656);

// → 79 thousand

Scientific and Engineering notation

Apart from “compact”, you can also pass in the “engineering” and “scientific” to the notation to get the respective format of the number respectively, like so.

new Intl.NumberFormat(undefined, { 
    notation: "scientific"
}).format(78656666589);

// → 7.866E10

new Intl.NumberFormat(undefined, { 
    notation: "engineering"
}).format(78656666589);

// → 78.657E9

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