I'm working on an app where I need to take several sets of numeric values (currently stored as NSDecimalNumber), and display them in columns. Each set will have approximately the same magnitude, but the magnitude of each set may change, and I won't know ahead of time what they are. So one might be values like (1.23, 2.3, 1.567), and another (1234.1, 2345, 1999.4).
In order to make the columns line up, and to know how much space I'll need, what I'd like to do is to figure out, for each set of numbers, the width of the format I'll need. In other words, the maximum number of integer places, and the maximum number of fractional places. For the examples above: 1 and 3 in the first case, 4 and 1 in the second. Now, the NSDecimal representation would answer this directly, by combining the length of the mantissa and the value of the exponent. The problem is, the fields of that structure are explicitly private, and there doesn't appear to be any API to get the values of the mantissa and exponent out of it. One workaround might be to convert each number to a string in the POSIX locale, and then measure its length and the position of the decimal point. But that seems like a very long way around. And I'm shamefully sketchy on my C math, but I'd guess that there's a route to the answer there, also (possibly with some loss of precision?). What's the simplest and/or most efficient way of deriving this information? _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
