Representing Monetary Values in Java

java currency bigdecimal
dshaw picture dshaw · Nov 12, 2008 · Viewed 42.9k times · Source

I understand that BigDecimal is recommended best practice for representing monetary values in Java. What do you use? Is there a better library that you prefer to use instead?

Answer

ninesided picture ninesided · Nov 12, 2008

BigDecimal all the way. I've heard of some folks creating their own Cash or Money classes which encapsulate a cash value with the currency, but under the skin it's still a BigDecimal, probably with BigDecimal.ROUND_HALF_EVEN rounding.

Edit: As Don mentions in his answer, there are open sourced projects like timeandmoney, and whilst I applaud them for trying to prevent developers from having to reinvent the wheel, I just don't have enough confidence in a pre-alpha library to use it in a production environment. Besides, if you dig around under the hood, you'll see they use BigDecimal too.

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