Documentation on THOUSAND_SEPARATOR and NUMBER_GROUPING is still misleading

[Felix Dreissig]

The THOUSAND_SEPARATOR and NUMBER_GROUPING settings are only used if the current locale doesn't specify a thousands separator. This has been reported in #15918 and the following sentence has been added to the documentation:

Note that if USE_L10N is set to True, then the locale-dictated format has higher precedence and will be applied instead.

However, the same page of the documentation says about USE_THOUSAND_SEPARATOR:

When USE_L10N is set to True and if this is also set to True, Django will use the values of THOUSAND_SEPARATOR and NUMBER_GROUPING to format numbers.

These two quotes are kind of contradictory, because obviously one really can't use USE_THOUSAND_SEPARATOR without USE_L10N. The latter quote is plain wrong in most cases, as most locales define thousands separators.

THOUSAND_SEPARATOR and NUMBER_GROUPING are really only respected if USE_L10N = True, USE_THOUSAND_SEPARATOR = True and the locale doesn't specify a thousands separator. I think it would be great to just use USE_THOUSAND_SEPARATOR without USE_L10N and manually set THOUSAND_SEPARATOR and NUMBER_GROUPING, but that is currently not possible.

Anyway, I think the discrepancy should at least be removed form the documentation.

Regards,
Felix

[Tim Graham]

Could you submit a pull request with the proposed clarifications?

[Wingston SHaron]

can you take a look and see if the clarifications are correct?

​https://github.com/Wingie/django/tree/ticket_25928

[Felix Dreissig]

Replying to Wingie:

can you take a look and see if the clarifications are correct?

​https://github.com/Wingie/django/tree/ticket_25928

Looks good to me, it precisely describes the current behavior.
You could get rid of the ":setting:USE_L10N is set to True, and" part in the second paragraph though, as the previous paragraph already states that USE_L10N must always be True. I find that repetition rather confusing.

One could also ask if a behavior which requires such verbose explanations is really sensible, but that's out of scope for this bug report.

Thanks for the fix,
Felix

[Tim Graham <timograham@…>]

In abcf3fe6:

[1.9.x] Fixed #25928 -- Clarified precendence of USE_THOUSAND_SEPARATOR and locale formats.

Backport of 7f218d98915ef3e76a98ef72075a6bde907dfe41 from master

[Tim Graham <timograham@…>]

In 7f218d98:

Fixed #25928 -- Clarified precendence of USE_THOUSAND_SEPARATOR and locale formats.