Yii 2.0 comes with a formatter component to format dates, numbers, and other values for international users according to their locale. This is very useful for displaying data. When working with incoming data or when using enhanced input methods like the MaskedInput widget you sometimes need to access the symbols used by the formatter to generate a pattern or parse the input.

The Yii formatter does not have methods to access this data, it relies on the PHP intl extension for formatting. If you want to access the formatting symbols you need to work with intl directly.

Getting decimal and thousand separator ¶

$locale = 'de_DE';

$formatter = new \NumberFormatter($locale,\NumberFormatter::DECIMAL);

$decimalSeparator = $formatter->getSymbol(\NumberFormatter::DECIMAL_SEPARATOR_SYMBOL);
$thousandSeparator = $formatter->getSymbol(\NumberFormatter::GROUPING_SEPARATOR_SYMBOL);

There are more symbols than shown above, for the full list of symbols see the list of NumberFormatter constants in the php manual.

Getting a currency symbol ¶

Getting the currency symbol is a bit more complicated if you do not want the symbol of the default currency of a locale, but another currency:

$locale = 'de_DE'; // get the currency symbol of Germanys default currency EUR = "€"
$locale = 'de_DE@currency=USD'; // get the currency symbol of USD in German locale = "$"

$formatter = new \NumberFormatter($locale, \NumberFormatter::CURRENCY);

$currencySymbol = $formatter->getSymbol(\NumberFormatter::CURRENCY_SYMBOL);

Note, that the NumberFormatter is instantiated with the CURRENCY constant instead of DECIMAL here.

Since Yii 2.0.14 Yii has this method built-in in the Locale class.