I have a JSP with some monetary amounts in £s. I want people viewing the same page from the US to see $ symbol instead of £s. (Forget for a moment that the values ought to be converted as well).
I am using this JSTL solution to set the locale
<c:set var="language" value="${not empty param.language ? param.language : not empty language ? language : pageContext.request.locale}" scope="session" />
<fmt:setLocale value="${language}" />
which works perfectly for output fields like this:
<fmt:formatNumber type="currency" value="${myOutputAmount}" />
but there are also some input fields that have the £ on its own before the input box, e.g.:
£<input type="text" id="myInputAmount"/>
How can I use that locale to show the relevant currency symbol instead of £?
I have searched and found solutions for iPhone, PHP, android, C# and Java. I could implement a Java solution in my JSP but the JSTL one was so neat I'm sure there must be an easy way, tapping into however that works.
There is unfortunately no JSTL tag for this.
In plain Java you could get it by Currency#getSymbol() as follows:
String currencySymbol = Currency.getInstance(new Locale(language)).getSymbol();
// ...
You could wrap it around in a Javabean getter, an EL function or maybe a (shudder) scriptlet. You can find a concrete example of how to create an EL function near the bottom of this answer.
Update: you could use this "hack" to get the currency symbol out of a <fmt:formatNumber>:
<fmt:formatNumber var="currencyExample" value="${0}" type="currency" maxFractionDigits="0" />
<c:set var="currencySymbol" value="${fn:replace(currencyExample, '0', '')}" />
...
${currencySymbol}<input type="text" name="amount" />