The virtue of using CSS <span> gaps is the entire significand can be  
copied and pasted into applications like Excel, where they will be  
automatically treated as numbers without the need to hand-delete non- 
breaking spaces, which are unique and distinct characters. To see the  
difference in action, see here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Greg_L#Val

Greg

On Feb 1, 2009, at 12:52 PM, Aryeh Gregor wrote:

On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 12:39 AM, Tim Starling  
<[email protected]> wrote:
> I would rather have an application-specific number formatting  
> function,
> rather than a character-counting function. It could be similar to  
> PHP's
> number_format(). Wikitext is a terrible programming language, slow to
> execute and hard to understand. It's much better to write in PHP.

Note that {{val}} uses at least a few strange HTML-specific hacks,
like using CSS instead of space characters to create spaces between
the digit groups (for copy-paste purposes).  Something that would work
like {{val}} would be considerably different from number_format().

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