Plotting pushpins based on the French coordinate format

Question

Plotting pushpins based on the French coordinate format

Balasaheb Molawade 136

Hi,

We have developed an application using Bing Maps to plot pushpins, and it works fine in English. However, when we change the PC language to French, the latitude/longitude format changes, replacing '.' with ','. This causes the pushpin plotting to fail. Is there a way to resolve this issue.

Thanks!

rbrundritt 21,496 Reputation points Microsoft Employee Moderator

2024-05-28T17:30:34.25+00:00

Can you provide more information on your application. Are you converting lat/lon values to a string? If so, is this in JavaScript? How are you doing this?

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rbrundritt 21,496 Reputation points Microsoft Employee Moderator

2024-05-28T17:30:34.25+00:00

Can you provide more information on your application. Are you converting lat/lon values to a string? If so, is this in JavaScript? How are you doing this?

Answer 1

rbrundritt 21,496 Microsoft Employee Moderator

I'm assuming you using JavaScript in a browser and have the latitude/longitude values and are trying to create a string like "latitude, longitude" and want the numbers to use periods for decimal places. As you likely know some cultures use a comma as a decimal place instead. If you simply convert a number to a string in JavaScript it will be formatted based on the culture setting of the browser/device. For example:

var latitude = 45.001;
var longitude = -110.001;

var coordString = latitude + ', ' + longitude;

//The coordString value could be "45.001, -110.001" or "45,001, -110,001" depending on culture setting.

To better handle this and force the numbers to use a period for a decimal place, you can use the toLocaleString function and set the culture to en-US.

var latitude = 45.001;
var longitude = -110.001;

var coordString = latitude.toLocaleString('en-US') + ', ' + longitude.toLocaleString('en-US');

//The coordString value would only be "45.001, -110.001" regardless of the browsers culture setting.

Balasaheb Molawade 136 Reputation points

2024-05-29T14:42:24.0466667+00:00

Hi Ricky,

Thanks for your reply.

We have developed a Xamarin app (C#) in which we load Bing Maps and plot user location. If the user has French/Spanish language settings, coordinates are formatted with ',' instead of '.'. This causes the code to break and prevents anything from being plotted on the map.

Thanks!
rbrundritt 21,496 Reputation points Microsoft Employee Moderator

2024-05-29T15:43:29.37+00:00
In C# you can use InvariantCulture to format numbers as strings with periods always in the following way:

string coordString = string.Format(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture, "{0},{1}",Point.Latitude,Point.Longitude);

If you want to limit the number of decimal places (6 is about 10cm accuracy), you can do the following:

string coordString = string.Format(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture, "{0:0.######},{1:0.######}",Point.Latitude,Point.Longitude);
Balasaheb Molawade 136 Reputation points

2024-05-30T11:34:28.5666667+00:00

Hi Ricky,

Thanks for your response. It's really helpful.

Thanks!

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Plotting pushpins based on the French coordinate format

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