Ireland, Malta, and Cypress use the Euro as their currency but use dot as their decimal separator so without further context €50.000 is ambiguous.

Probably the best way to handle this is the way SI recommends dot vs comma be handled in scientific and technical writing. Their recommendation is to use a thin space for grouping, so if you see a dot or comma it is the decimal separator.

€50.000 and €50,000 would then both be exactly €50. If you meant €50000 and wanted to separate the thousands you would would write €50 000 (which looks ugly on HN because HN turns thin space into regular space).

Update: actually, SI used to recommend thin space. Now they just say space without saying what kind of space. Some people recommend choosing narrow non-breaking space (U+202F) (which HN also turns into regular space).

Also, for 4 digit numbers before the decimal they recommend not separating them, so 5k Euros would be €5000 not €5 000.

I need to make an urgent call to my accountant.

50.000 EUR is exactly 50 EUR, though. 50,000 EUR is not.

For the record, before you down-vote, check the other comments. I am from an European country where we "officially" use "," as the decimal point (so yes, I know it might not be universally true, at least not in theory), yet my bank uses ".", and so do people (many, at least). In IT, it always has been ".", too. Of course in elementary school (>20 years ago) we used "," as the decimal point, FWIW. :P It might still be the practice there.

Most European countries use . as the thousands separator and , as the decimal point.

I know, I live in such an European country, but I still know (and use) "." as the decimal point. Most people I know here do, too, and they are not in IT. I think it often depends on context, too, and I would like to think people just know.

I just checked, my bank uses "." as the decimal point, too, instead of the official ",".

> I think it often depends on context, too

I get that people can be flexible about understanding that `.` and `,` do not have a stable definition especially in an international world, but I would have thought that 50.000 EUR in context would clearly be 50 thousand. Who specifies cents with 3 digits?

I have seen it in many different places. At some I had to figure out what they really meant.

My bank is inconsistent, by the way. It uses "1234.00" where the last "00" is the cents. It was "1.234" in the same SMS. In another message (same bank) it uses "12,34". Weird. Although in the last case it might be because it is EUR, not HUF, but they are still very inconsistent.

Hah - there I go acting like I know more about Europe than a European. TIL!

Let me guess: Ireland or Malta? If not, then Germany?

Hungary. Would have you ever guessed? :P

If you turn on localization on your PC, it will use "," instead of "." (in MS Word, definitely) for decimal points though, but as I was saying, in practice (and in real life), "." seems to be the common standard still for the decimal point, it seems, even though officially it is not.

> Hungary uses a comma (",") as the decimal separator, not a period ("."). In Hungarian, a comma is used to separate the fractional part of a number from the whole part, while a period or space is used to group digits in thousands. For example, "one and a half" would be written as 1,5 in Hungarian.

Real life would beg to differ, however. My bank uses "." instead of ",", and I have had the same experience elsewhere, too. In IT, it has always been ".", too.

Interesting! I wouldn't have guessed, my next candidate would have been the Netherlands.

How is ISO date (2025-07-21) adoption in Hungary?

It is all over the place (pretty inconsistent), but I just checked my appointments to physiotherapy (printed on paper). The format is "YYYY.MM.DD", close enough. :D

From what I recall, I see this format a lot. That, and "%Y. %B|%b. %d". The latter may be the most common? I am not entirely sure. I do not mind these two formats. I have an issue with formats like 2025/05/09 and the like. Is it May, or September? It is ambiguous. Thankfully they are not common here, AFAIK.

Depends on what language you speak. Having gotten used to commas as decimal separators, semantic versions never were that confusing to me.

See, this is why Canada (being a bilingual country) tried really hard to make "use spaces as the thousands separator" a thing. I mean it didn't catch on but they tried.