[morph-developer] Would like to change TextToNumberConverter

[Matt S. <Mat...@wh...>]

Right now the TextToNumberConverter is configurable with these properties:

Converter textConverter (specifies how one textual format is converted 
into another, e.g. String -> StringBuffer)
Converter numberConverter (specifies how one number is converted into 
another, e.g. -> Double -> Long)
char[] symbolsToIgnore = { '(', ')', ' ', '\t', '\r', '\n' }

Based on whether symbolsToIgnore includes opening and closing 
parantheses the converter decides whether or not values in parantheses 
should be negated.  In fact, there is even an internal transient 
property called negateValuesInParantheses that is set based on the 
values in symbolsToIgnore.  I think this behavior is backwards.  It is 
not at all obvious that in order to turn on the ability to make "(1000)" 
become -1000L I need to set the symbolsToIgnore to the char[] array { ' 
', '\t', '\r', '\n' }. 

I would like to get rid of this public symbolsToIgnore array and add new 
configuration properties as follows:

handlePercentages (default true) - determines whether text value ending 
in % should be divided by 100 when converted to a number.  so, 100% 
becomes 1 and 10% becomes .1
ignoreWhitespace (default true) - automatically remove all whitespace 
before attempting the conversion.  this would be useful if, for example, 
a user enters " 3" instead of "3" in a form on accident.
negateValuesInParantheses (default true) - if a number begins and ends 
with (), automatically treat it as a negative number.  if this value is 
set to false, an exception would most likely be thrown when converting 
the text to a number (unless there's some locale where they use ( to be 
the thousands separator or something, lol)

Like it?  Hate it?  I need this ASAP for work so I am planning on coding 
it today.

Matt