java - Locale Currency Symbol

Question

I having some problems getting the default currency symbol of the system. I am getting the currency symbol this way:

Currency currency = Currency.getInstance(Locale.getDefault());
Log.v("TAG",currency.getSymbol());

When the system language is in English (United States) the right symbol shows up ($). But when i choose the language Portuguese (Portugal) it returns this symbol ¤.

What can be causing this?

Answer 1

This seems to be a known issue (http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=38622. I came to a possible solution this way:

Since the problem is in the Symbol and not the Currency code, i solved this problem creating a staticMap where the key is the CurrencyCode and the value is the Symbol.

public static final Map<String, String> MYCURRENCIES = new HashMap<String, String>(){
        {
            put("EUR","€");
            put("USD","$");
            (..)
        }
};

In order to get all (or almost) the currencies codes available in the locales information you can do something like this:

for (Locale ll: Locale.getAvailableLocales()){
    try {
       Currency a = Currency.getInstance(ll);
       Log.v("MyCurrency",a.getCurrencyCode()+"#"+a.getSymbol());
    }catch (Exception e){
       // when the locale is not supported
  }
}

After you created you Map with the CurrencyCode and Symbol you just have to something like this:

Currency currency = Currency.getInstance(Locale.getDefault());
String curSymbol = MYCURRENCIES.get(currency.getCurrencyCode());