ASP.NET Change Culture for ONLY Currency not date, etc - asp.net

Question

I have a base class that inherits a page and changes the culture based on a pre-determined value set in the database. I need the culture to change the currency symbol but nothing else. If the value in the db says en-GB I need for it to change all currency values on the page to British pounds, and if it sais en-US show a US Dollar Sign. I need the culture variable to only effect the currency and nothing else, all dates, etc should be in the default culture(en-US)
Any ideas?

Answer 1

Basically you need to use a format provider when formatting your numbers as currency. Have a look at the following example:
public static string CulturedCurrency(decimal number,string culture = "en-US")
{
NumberFormatInfo numberInfo = CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture(culture).NumberFormat;
return number.ToString("c",numberInfo);
}
Reference: http://geekswithblogs.net/dtotzke/articles/24573.aspx
If you want to do it inline on databinding have a look at the code here: Format string by CultureInfo

Answer 2

I have found the solution I was looking for. Going through and changing each element of currency to use the specified culture was not something that would be easily done so I started playing with other options and what I have found was that if I used the culture function in my base class I could do the following:
System.Globalization.CultureInfo ci;
if (culture == "")
{
ci = new System.Globalization.CultureInfo("en-US");
}
else
{
ci = new System.Globalization.CultureInfo(culture);
}
System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = ci;
System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = ci;
ci.DateTimeFormat.ShortDatePattern = "MM/dd/yyyy";
ci.DateTimeFormat.LongDatePattern = "dddd, MMMM dd, yyyy";
ci.DateTimeFormat.DateSeparator = "/";
This will set the culture to what I want and then set the date of the culture (no matter what the culture is) to the US Format of the datetime. Thanks for all the help!

Answer 3

Most ToString methods take a format provider; the Culture Info is a format provider. You are going to have to leave the current culture as en-US and manually format the currency values using the ToString() method.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/3ebe5aks.aspx
HTH.

Answer 4

using System.Globalization;
...
value.ToString(CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture("en-US"));

Answer 5

A little add on Rob's answer, if you have a localization attribute in your URL, and thus setting the Culture on every request, you might just want to do it like this:
//get language attribute from url. (requires special routing in MVC)
string lang = (string)filterContext.RouteData.Values["lang"] ?? _DefaultLanguage;
switch (lang)
{
case "nl":
lang = "nl-NL";
break;
case "en":
lang = "en-GB";
break;
case "en-US":
lang = "en-US";
break;
default:
lang = _DefaultLanguage;//nl-NL
break;
}
NumberFormatInfo numberInfo = CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture("nl-NL").NumberFormat; //always use euros as currency
CultureInfo info = new CultureInfo(lang);
info.NumberFormat = numberInfo;