How to handle decimal marker (point and comma) correctly for Numeric Response questions
Description
Activity
Hui Tsao September 27, 2007 at 11:48 AM
Comment from Ann Paterson:
Personally, I would much rather have an option for the instructor to choose treatment of commas rather than a default setting for each locale. There are too many possibilities for problems with a default setting.
Hui Tsao September 27, 2007 at 11:48 AM
Comment from Mark Norton:
Internationalization has aspects to it that are often ignored beyond
string translation. Decimal notations do vary, as this thread
indicates, as do date formats, and currency notations. The java.text
package has support for dealing with this issues. In particular, I
would draw attention to java.text. DecimalFormat that will handle
decimal string conversion to java.lang.Number and thence to Double.
Hui Tsao September 27, 2007 at 11:48 AM
Comment from Ken Masters:
And just to add to the confusion, in South Africa, we generally use the
"." as a decimal, but we say it out loud as "comma." We use a space as
the delimiter between sets of three numbers. i.e. the US 2,300,211.35
We write as: 2 300 211.35 and read is as that, except we say "comma" for
the decimal. And some people say "point." 
Hui Tsao September 27, 2007 at 11:47 AM
Comment from Feliz Ribeiro Gouveia:
I agree the locale should be used. Can we make this a
requirement/criteria for every (new) tool, to comply with
internationalization issues?
Ditto for string handling, at least sorting is affected by the Locale:
eg we have all names starting with "Á" at the end of the lists, while
they should be at the beginning; that's confusing for users
Hui Tsao September 27, 2007 at 11:47 AM
Comment from Raul Mengod:
Here in Spain we have used tratitionally "," as a decimal separator and "."
as thousands separator.
After the use of computers and internet in the last years things are
getting confused. People is starting to use "." as decimal separator. As
only a small number of programs are properly constructed. That means that
the right use should be to use the locale to distinguish wich is the decimal
separator on each region. For instance, sakai is having that behaviour only
in some tools.
The reallity is that everytime I get to a place where I have to put a
numerical number, I decide not to use the thousand separator and I have to
try it with the 2 alternatives for the decimal separator.
So I think the less problematic behaviour could be NOT TO USE THE THOUSAND
SEPARATOR and let the user use "," or "." as decimal. Also with a message
explaining it.
Hope this Help.
Details
Details
Priority
Major
This issue is reported by Melissa from CMC:
---------------------------------- Today, a professor brought two issues with the numeric response
questions to my attention. I hope you can take a look at them.
1) The numeric response questions don't seem to consider "comas" as
eliminators in numbers. For example, if the instructor put down 9,000 as
the correct answer, it will consider 9000 as incorrect answer.
2) The numeric response questions. They don't seem to understand numbers
bigger than 1,000,000. For example, if you have 9,000,000 as the correct
answer, no matter what students put down as an answer, it will be
considered wrong.
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And here is our comment:
Samigo used to not allow users to insert commas in numerical
responses questions in Samigo Only numbers and decimal points
(period) is allowed. Then we were educated by our European users
that many European countries actually use commas as decimal points
instead of period. So we made the change to accept commas as decimal marker.
To avoid confusion, users should reserve , or . for decimals,
and not use them to separate thousands. We will see if we can add a
note in the UI.