Plotting pushpins based on the French coordinate format

Question

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!

Answer 1

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.