What programming/technical projects have you been working on?

I added support for other eBay marketplaces in my disk prices program: Austria, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, France, Great Britain, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Singapore, United States. Typing out this message made me realize there was a bug in my link extracting function that I use everywhere so I fixed that (unrelated to the website).

I've added a lot of small features and bugfixes to the site over the past week. One of the most interesting parts is probably the way that I represent currencies in the different region pages. At first I was customizing everything with a special DataTable render function which required me to pass in data about the way that each currency should be formatted--not just the currency symbol but also the different way that Belgium writes the € before the amount and France writes it after--though both use , instead of .. And the Swiss use ' to separate groups of thousands instead of , but . for cents.

$.fn.dataTable.render.number(',', '.', 2, '$')

All of that information starts to become a bit tedious... but I was making good progress and almost done when I realized that the browser really does a better job at this:

Enter Intl.NumberFormat!

I basically replaced all of that complicated code with this:

const _fmt_currency = new Intl.NumberFormat('en-US', { style: 'currency', currency: 'USD' }).format

function fmt_currency(data, type, row) {
    if (type === 'display') {
        return _fmt_currency(data);
    }
    return data;
}

By replacing the currency code for the different pages, it all works inside the browser. A lot easier and more accurate.

Another thing that I realized that I could do to make things more localized is that instead of doing this (for the number of seller reviews, which is often in the thousands):

$.fn.dataTable.render.number(',') 

With DataTables.js I can just leave the preset blank and it uses the browser's locale:

$.fn.dataTable.render.number()

To test this I opened a browser like this:

LANGUAGE=fr chromium-browser

Neat!