Keyboard: issue with decimal point under iOS 11.2

User that have set their region to Swiss and language to French report an issue under iOS 11.2. Swiss franc (CHF) is using "." as decimal point. Howvever, after upgrading to iOS 11.2, the decimal pad keyboard is now displaying "," instead of "." making entry of a decimal value impossible.


Any ideas for a workaround?

Accepted Reply

Just tested iOS 12.2 beta 4 and the issue seems to be fixed!!!

Replies

I have filed a bug for this issue: 35911116

Hi. Any response to this radar from Apple?


This affects quite a few users for me since iOS 11.2 was released. However I don't know whether Aple consider this a bug or whether they have just changed the way it works...

Ok, have submitted my own Radar for this. I am quite surprised there are not more people reporting this, seems a fairly major issue for apps which allow data entry of decimal numbers.

No answer from Apple yet. I completely agree on what you said.


Cheers

Frustrating! It seems like an obvious bug on the face of it. The default keyboard decimal separator differs from the decimal separator which is returned from an NSNumberFormatter using the default locale, meaning that turning the amount string into a number will fail. It would also seem strange to introduce such a change in a point release.


I can't decide between waiting to see if an iOS update fixes this, or coding a workaround. It would be easy enough to take the user entered string, then replace the most common decimal separators (. ,) with the decimal separator from NSNumberFormatter. This should capture 99.9% of use cases.

No change in 11.2.1 sadly

Replacing the decimal separator should work, however, I don't think this gives a nice user experience. I still hope this will be fixed by Apple soon.

No, well it would only be a workaround. There is nothing that can be done about the decimal separator in the system keyboard, so other than using your own keyboard there is nothing else to be done. Was hoping it would be fixed in 11.2.1, and rather disturbing that it is not.

Also no change in 11.2.5 Would be important to know if Apple sees the modified decimal mark as some sort of correction (as to my knowledge the use of “.” vs. “,” is not consistent through Switzerland), however, IMHO such a modification would be inconsistent, as for region CH and language DE the keyboard continues to display “.” as decimal mark. Cheers

The problem also exists for countries where the decimal separator is used consistently (e.g. having UK as the region, where the separator is always a ".", but appears as a "," if the language is set to French). If not fixed in 11.2.5, then I fear that this may be a design change, which would really be quite confusing. As it is, there is now no way for a user to override the decimal separator used throughout iOS.

Interesting, thanks for this information. I would still insist that it is a bug, because - in my opinion - it doesn't make a lot of sense to derive the number format from the language.

I quite agree. That is why the 'Region' setting exists, so users can decide for themselves what the decimal separator should be (along with all the other region specific formatting it brings).


If you get your Radar updated, I would be grateful if you could keep me updated (no reply to my Radar yet).

Sure. Unfortunately, no improvement in iOS 11.2.5 beta 2.

And neither improvement in iOS 11.2.5 beta 3.

As there is no change in iOS 11.2.5 beta 4, I would really like to understand if this change was introduced on purpose.