Display international currency

Question

What is the globally accepted way of displaying international currencies?

For example: US$20, $20, $20 (US), €20, 20€, etc?

If there are many ways to show each currency, what is a good general way of showing currency?

Also note that not all currencies divide their base unit into 100ths, like the USD - 100 cents to the dollar. — Thanatos, Nov 28 '09 at 21:42

score 5 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 28 '09 at 21:34

I didn't find any single way. That said:

Show the amount (obviously)
Show the ISO currency code
Optionally show a user-friendly symbol

Don't rely on $ or £ -- several currencies use these symbols. ISO currency codes make it unambiguous. I usually do:

[user-friendly-symbol][amount] [iso code]

For example, $100 USD or €2,000,000 EUR

For the thousand separator, I usually take the local user's preference, rather than trying to figure out if that currency is generally formatted with , or .

See ISO 4217

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 28 '09 at 21:31

3

ISO Currency Codes are the standard, although you might want to special-case certain common currencies (eg, USD, GBP, JPY, EUR etc) and display their symbols too.

answered Nov 28 '09 at 21:31

LukeH

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Updating to 2021: https://www.iso.org/iso-4217-currency-codes.html – Charles Sep 13 '21 at 11:56

score 3 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 28 '09 at 21:32

3

ISO 4217

answered Nov 28 '09 at 21:32

CBFraser

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score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 10:25

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This has been a popular issue around here. See if any of these help you out:

Best Practice - Format Multiple Currencies

Proper currency format when not displaying the native currency of a culture

Currency formatting

edited May 23 '17 at 10:25

Community

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answered Nov 28 '09 at 21:34

DOK

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score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Nov 28 '09 at 21:31

0

I think it's generally accepted this is the best way to do it:

USD$30
AUS$40

And these currencies are displayed like this by default:

£20 
€20

answered Nov 28 '09 at 21:31

Ben Everard

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score 0 · Answer 6 · answered Nov 28 '09 at 21:35

0

The ISO 4217 currency code plus the value. So USD20, EUR20.

answered Nov 28 '09 at 21:35

Mark Thornton

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score 0 · Answer 7 · answered Nov 28 '09 at 21:37

I do not work in this field but I believe it should be displayed with a 3 letter code after the sum like :

  20 EUR
 105 GBP
86.4 USD

There are so many countries using dollars, francs (except France, using euros now) and so on There is still the problem of the separators:

1,000,000.00 USD but
1 000 000,00 EUR here in France

Display international currency

7 Answers7