Problem:
When displaying a lot of money sums at once, such as in a spreadsheet-like table with tons of cells, it looks very messy to see "SEK 123,456.79" or "123 456,79 US$" in every cell. I'd like to "cut the fluff" from the money sum formatter, so that the presented money sums become "minimal" numbers but of course still use the correct thousands separators and decimal characters for money sums in the specified language/locale!
Minimal example code:
$a = new \NumberFormatter('en_US', \NumberFormatter::CURRENCY);
$a->setAttribute(\NumberFormatter::MAX_FRACTION_DIGITS, 2);
var_dump($a->formatCurrency(123456.789, 'USD'));
var_dump($a->formatCurrency(123456.789, 'SEK'));
$a = new \NumberFormatter('sv_SE', \NumberFormatter::CURRENCY);
$a->setAttribute(\NumberFormatter::MAX_FRACTION_DIGITS, 2);
var_dump($a->formatCurrency(123456.789, 'USD'));
var_dump($a->formatCurrency(123456.789, 'SEK'));
Actual output:
string(11) "$123,456.79"
string(15) "SEK 123,456.79"
string(16) "123 456,79 US$"
string(15) "123 456,79 kr"
Desired outout:
string(X) "123,456.79"
string(X) "123,456.79"
string(X) "123 456,79"
string(X) "123 456,79"
That is, "use the same rules, but just don't include those extra strings in the beginning/end of each, please".
Important notes:
Please don't tell me to just use the non-currency NumberFormatter mode, since some/many languages/locales have different rules for how to format non-monetary and monetary numbers, even without regard to the "fluff" I'm trying to trim away. Remember, I'm just trying to avoid repeating the same formatting many times on the same page -- they are still money sums and not just "any" numbers.
Also, please don't tell me to use some kind of "string replacement" on the finished strings since the formats wildly vary between languages/locales. I cannot guarantee or assume that every format in existence will only add non-digits before/after the number. Plus, this just feels horribly wrong to me.
Also, I realize that in my specific example, it would work to use \NumberFormatter::DECIMAL, but that's just out of sheer luck, and cannot be the right solution since it wouldn't be "aware" that it's a money sum. Even if it would work for every locale/language combo, it would still feel wrong because, after all, they are money sums, even if they are being presented in a "compact" version.
Before asking here, I've wrestled a lot with this problem, and went through this page one last time without finding any COMPACT option or similar: https://www.php.net/manual/en/class.numberformatter.php#intl.numberformatter-constants.unumberformatattribute