Month: February 2009

Converting from scientific number format to decimal or string in C#

Matt Simner C# ,

I’m a programmer, but there are a few things I’ll admit I don’t do much of (as I have little interest in learning).  Playing with numbers in scientific notation is one of them.

I was importing from a spreadsheet and needed to get “6.00234419836431E+15” to something readable.

I discovered that you need to specify a NumberStyle when you parse as a decimal, because by default you’ll get an error as it expects an ‘easy’ conversion.

The number above had decimals, exponent, the lot – so the following line of code does the job nicely…

Console.WriteLine(decimal.Parse(“6.00234419836431E+15”, System.Globalization.NumberStyles.Any).ToString());
//Globalisation namespace just shown for clarity – you’ll want to put this in a using statement 🙂

This gives you “6002344198364310”. Sweet.

Make JQuery and Prototpye coexist and play together with a GreaseMonkey User Script

Matt Simner JQuery, Redbubble, Web , ,

I’ve been playing with Greasemonkey scripts recently – for Redbubble.com, and wanted to use JQuery with GreaseMonkey.  This is pretty well documented, but I discovered an incompatibility with my script and the host site, as it uses the Prototype Javascript library (must admit I didn’t know much about it).

Prototype (like JQuery) uses the $ notation, and so by default any GreaseMonkey User Script loaded will hijack the $ object, meaning that stuff on the original site may stop working.

I thought I was sunk but it turns out JQuery just gets better, and it can gracefully give back control of the $ to whichever library originally loaded it.  Just call..

jQuery.noConflict();

You then have to use jQuery instead of $ (e.g. jQuery(“#myID”) instead of $(“#myID”) ), but hey – that’s a small price to pay when the alternative is rewriting the whole thing long-hand.