#120 Add support for %g in numeric format

[Jason S]

The number_format setting appears to require use of the java.text.DecimalFormat-style format string. This does not support %g, which is important for handling wide dynamic-range values formatted for human readability. I have cases where the value to be formatted is equally likely to be a small number like 5.2e-6, and a large number like 5.2. In the former case, I do not want it to be formatted as 0.0000052; in the latter case I do not want it to be formatted as 5.2e0. The %g printf()-style format specifier handles this nicely but DecimalFormat doesn't seem to give me an equivalent.

Is there a way this could be achieved?

[Dániel Dékány]

I have moved this over from "bugs" to "feature requests".

Currently FreeMarker doesn't support setting a number format that's not defined by DecimalFormat. This limitation is known to be a problem, and addressing this is quite high on the TODO list, but I don't dare to tell a date when this will be fixed. Until that, what you can do is defining a TemplateMethodModelEx, put that into the data-model or into the Configuration as shared variable (or into an #import like <#assign myFormat = 'com.example.MyFormat'?new()>) and then format the numbers like ${myFormat(x)}.