Today I spend A LOT OF time on trying to display a percentage – string representation of a decimal but without trailing zeros, e.g. 15.1% instead of 15.10%.

In the application I already had NumberFormatInfo for displaying monetary values and percentages. An object of that type was defined as follows:

NumberFormatInfo nfi = new NumberFormatInfo();
nfi.PercentDecimalDigits = 2;
// some additional settings for nfi
// (including monetary and numeric attributes)

Let’s take the following decimals as examples:

decimal d = 0.241534545765;
decimal d2 = 0.241;
decimal d3 = 0.2;

Having nfi I could get a string representation of a decimal as below:

d.toString("P", nfi);		//24.15%
d2.toString("P", nfi);		//24.10%
d3.toString("P", nfi);		//20.00%

As you see nfi was defined so that only two decimal places were displayed, but always, disregarding the fact whether they are zeros or not. I tried to find a member of NumberFormatInfo class, a hint of how to use it for that purpose (including parsing the string as a result of toString with passing nfi – sick!), but unfortunately I failed.

Solution

Only then a friend of mine showed me how to use decimal.toString() without an instance of NumberFormatInfo class.

d.toString("0.##%");		//24.15%
d2.toString("0.##%");		//24.1%
d3.toString("0.##%");		//20%

It’s worth mentioning that weren’t there ‘%’ character in the expression passed to toString method I would first have to multiply the decimals by 100:

(d * 100).toString("0.##");		//24.15%
(d2 * 100).toString("0.##");		//24.1%
(d3 * 100).toString("0.##");		//20%

That’s it… It’s frustrating I couldn’t fix it myself in a couple of minutes. However at the end of the day the problem is solved, which is a good news.