Language - Comma decimal place

A dot (.) is used to mark the decimal place in Javascript, however, many parts of the world use a comma (,) and other characters such as the Unicode decimal separator () or a dash (-) are often used to show the decimal place in a displayed number.

When reading such numbers, Javascript won't automatically recognise them as numbers, however, DataTables' type detection and sorting methods can be instructed through the language.decimal option which character is used as the decimal place in your numbers. This will be used to correctly adjust DataTables' type detection and sorting algorithms to sort numbers in your table.

Any character can be passed in using the language.decimal option, although the decimal place character used in a single table must be consistent (i.e. numbers with a dot decimal place and comma decimal place cannot both appear in the same table). Different tables on the same page can use different decimal characters if required.

The example below shows a comma being used as the decimal place in the currency numbers shown in the final column.

Name Position Office Age Start date Salary
Tiger Nixon System Architect Edinburgh 61 2011-04-25 $320.800,00
Garrett Winters Accountant Tokyo 63 2011-07-25 $170.750,00
Ashton Cox Junior Technical Author San Francisco 66 2009-01-12 $86.000,00
Cedric Kelly Senior Javascript Developer Edinburgh 22 2012-03-29 $433.060,00
Airi Satou Accountant Tokyo 33 2008-11-28 $162.700,00
Brielle Williamson Integration Specialist New York 61 2012-12-02 $372.000,00
Herrod Chandler Sales Assistant San Francisco 59 2012-08-06 $137.500,00
Rhona Davidson Integration Specialist Tokyo 55 2010-10-14 $327.900,00
Colleen Hurst Javascript Developer San Francisco 39 2009-09-15 $205.500,00
Sonya Frost Software Engineer Edinburgh 23 2008-12-13 $103.600,00
Jena Gaines Office Manager London 30 2008-12-19 $90.560,00
Quinn Flynn Support Lead Edinburgh 22 2013-03-03 $342.000,00
Charde Marshall Regional Director San Francisco 36 2008-10-16 $470.600,00
Haley Kennedy Senior Marketing Designer London 43 2012-12-18 $313.500,00
Tatyana Fitzpatrick Regional Director London 19 2010-03-17 $385.750,00
Michael Silva Marketing Designer London 66 2012-11-27 $198.500,00
Paul Byrd Chief Financial Officer (CFO) New York 64 2010-06-09 $725.000,00
Gloria Little Systems Administrator New York 59 2009-04-10 $237.500,00
Bradley Greer Software Engineer London 41 2012-10-13 $132.000,00
Dai Rios Personnel Lead Edinburgh 35 2012-09-26 $217.500,00
Jenette Caldwell Development Lead New York 30 2011-09-03 $345.000,00
Yuri Berry Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) New York 40 2009-06-25 $675.000,00
Caesar Vance Pre-Sales Support New York 21 2011-12-12 $106.450,00
Doris Wilder Sales Assistant Sydney 23 2010-09-20 $85.600,00
Angelica Ramos Chief Executive Officer (CEO) London 47 2009-10-09 $1.200.000,00
Gavin Joyce Developer Edinburgh 42 2010-12-22 $92.575,00
Jennifer Chang Regional Director Singapore 28 2010-11-14 $357.650,00
Brenden Wagner Software Engineer San Francisco 28 2011-06-07 $206.850,00
Fiona Green Chief Operating Officer (COO) San Francisco 48 2010-03-11 $850.000,00
Shou Itou Regional Marketing Tokyo 20 2011-08-14 $163.000,00
Michelle House Integration Specialist Sydney 37 2011-06-02 $95.400,00
Suki Burks Developer London 53 2009-10-22 $114.500,00
Prescott Bartlett Technical Author London 27 2011-05-07 $145.000,00
Gavin Cortez Team Leader San Francisco 22 2008-10-26 $235.500,00
Martena Mccray Post-Sales support Edinburgh 46 2011-03-09 $324.050,00
Unity Butler Marketing Designer San Francisco 47 2009-12-09 $85.675,00
Howard Hatfield Office Manager San Francisco 51 2008-12-16 $164.500,00
Hope Fuentes Secretary San Francisco 41 2010-02-12 $109.850,00
Vivian Harrell Financial Controller San Francisco 62 2009-02-14 $452.500,00
Timothy Mooney Office Manager London 37 2008-12-11 $136.200,00
Jackson Bradshaw Director New York 65 2008-09-26 $645.750,00
Olivia Liang Support Engineer Singapore 64 2011-02-03 $234.500,00
Bruno Nash Software Engineer London 38 2011-05-03 $163.500,00
Sakura Yamamoto Support Engineer Tokyo 37 2009-08-19 $139.575,00
Thor Walton Developer New York 61 2013-08-11 $98.540,00
Finn Camacho Support Engineer San Francisco 47 2009-07-07 $87.500,00
Serge Baldwin Data Coordinator Singapore 64 2012-04-09 $138.575,00
Zenaida Frank Software Engineer New York 63 2010-01-04 $125.250,00
Zorita Serrano Software Engineer San Francisco 56 2012-06-01 $115.000,00
Jennifer Acosta Junior Javascript Developer Edinburgh 43 2013-02-01 $75.650,00
Cara Stevens Sales Assistant New York 46 2011-12-06 $145.600,00
Hermione Butler Regional Director London 47 2011-03-21 $356.250,00
Lael Greer Systems Administrator London 21 2009-02-27 $103.500,00
Jonas Alexander Developer San Francisco 30 2010-07-14 $86.500,00
Shad Decker Regional Director Edinburgh 51 2008-11-13 $183.000,00
Michael Bruce Javascript Developer Singapore 29 2011-06-27 $183.000,00
Donna Snider Customer Support New York 27 2011-01-25 $112.000,00
Name Position Office Age Start date Salary
  • Javascript
  • HTML
  • CSS
  • Ajax
  • Server-side script
  • Comments

The Javascript shown below is used to initialise the table shown in this example:

$('#example').DataTable({ language: { decimal: ',', thousands: '.' } });
new DataTable('#example', { language: { decimal: ',', thousands: '.' } });

In addition to the above code, the following Javascript library files are loaded for use in this example:

The HTML shown below is the raw HTML table element, before it has been enhanced by DataTables:

This example uses a little bit of additional CSS beyond what is loaded from the library files (below), in order to correctly display the table. The additional CSS used is shown below:

The following CSS library files are loaded for use in this example to provide the styling of the table:

This table loads data by Ajax. The latest data that has been loaded is shown below. This data will update automatically as any additional data is loaded.

The script used to perform the server-side processing for this table is shown below. Please note that this is just an example script using PHP. Server-side processing scripts can be written in any language, using the protocol described in the DataTables documentation.

Other examples