Getting Text and Currency Working for Multiple Language Support

Localizing Numbers and Currencies

Next, we’ll show you how to change the product catalog to display the correctly formatted page count and price for the currently selected locale.

Open app/views/catalog/catalog.rhtml in your editor and append .localize to the code that prints the page count:

<h2>by <%= @book.authors.map{|a| a.name}.join(", ") %></h2>
<%= image_tag url_for_file_column(:book, :cover_image) ?
unless @book.cover_image.blank? % >
<dl>
  <dt>Price</dt>
  <dd>$<%= @book.price -%></dd>
  <dt>Page count</dt>
  <dd><%= @book.page_count.localize -%></dd>

This will now localize the page count. For example, a book having 400000 pages will be displayed as 400,000.

To localize the price field, we first need to modify the Book model ( app/models/book.rb ), as shown here:

class Book < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_taggable

  has_and_belongs_to_many :authors
  belongs_to :publisher
  has_many :cart_items
  has_many :carts, :through => :cart_items

  translates :title, :blurb
  acts_as_ferret :fields => [:title, :author_names]
  composed_of :price_localized, :class_name => "Globalize::Currency",
      :mapping => [ %w(price cents) ]

This adds the new field price_localized to the model, which will be properly formatted when used in a view.

Next, change the catalog view ( app/views/catalog/show.rhtml ) to use the new field:

<h2>by <%= @book.authors.map{|a| a.name}.join(", ") %></h2>
<%= image_tag url_for_file_column(:book, :cover_image) ?
unless @book.cover_image.blank? % >
<dl>
  <dt>Price</dt>
  <dd>$<%= @book.price_localized -%></dd>
  <dt>Page count</dt>
  <dd><%= @book.page_count.localize -%></dd>

Now if you access the book details page ( http://localhost:3000/catalog/show/1 ), you should see the following:

--------------------------------------------
Price
    $10,000.00
Page count
    400,000
--------------------------------------------