Formatting positive and negative numbers with C# .NET

Let’s say you have the following three numbers:

• 13.45
• -32.56
• 0

…and you’d like to format them as follows:

• +13.45
• -32.56
• (0)

There’s a special format string that can be used for this purpose. It consists of 3 parts separated by a semi-colon. The first part applies to positive numbers, the second to negative numbers and the third to zeroes:

private static void TestNumericFormat()
{
	double positive = 13.45;
	double negative = -32.56;
	double zero = 0;

	string format = "+#.##;-#.##;(0)";

	Console.WriteLine(positive.ToString(format));
	Console.WriteLine(negative.ToString(format));
	Console.WriteLine(zero.ToString(format));
}

…and here’s the output:

View all various C# language feature related posts here.