I had an issue where several international users were reporting that the game was crashing. As it turns out, using an NSNumberFormatter would return a weird character to display as the grouping separator. This would be all good and dandy, but the problem lies in the fact that I’m using bitmap fonts to render, and the look-up failed causing a hard crash.

In Tilt to Live’s case, this was in regards to how number grouping symbols are displayed in different locales. I use the comma to separate most of the number displays. Due to my ignorance, I just assumed ‘NSNumberFormatter’ would work with what I thought was a universal concept. Not so in some Arabic countries apparently. The fix? If you aren’t supporting localization just use the particular localization you are coding for, otherwise the formatter will use the iPhone’s language settings to pick a localization for you:

numberFormatter = [[NSNumberFormatter alloc]init];
NSLocale *locale = [[NSLocale alloc]initWithLocaleIdentifier:@"en-US"];
[numberFormatter setLocale:locale];
[numberFormatter setNumberStyle:kCFNumberFormatterDecimalStyle];
[numberFormatter setGroupingSeparator:@","];
[numberFormatter setUsesGroupingSeparator:YES];
[locale release];
locale = nil;