Formatting interpolated strings in SwiftUI

Paul Hudson @twostraws September 18th 2019

Fully updated for Xcode 11.2

OK, let’s fix up that order total so that it’s accurate. We’re going to add a totalPrice computed property to our type, which will calculate the value of their tip, add it to the total for their order, and return that amount.

Please add this to CheckoutView now:

var totalPrice: Double {
    let total = Double(order.total)
    let tipValue = total / 100 * Double(Self.tipAmounts[tipAmount])
    return total + tipValue
}

Now, remember that SwiftUI will re-invoke our body property whenever any of our @State properties change. As a result, we can use that computed property right inside our layout, and it will automatically change as the segmented control changes:

Section(header:
    Text("TOTAL: $\(totalPrice)")
) {

If you try that out you should see it all work more or less correctly, but take a look at the way our total price is formatted – $23.000000 isn’t the kind of thing users would expect to see when buying some food.

This happens because we’ve placed a Double into a string, so Swift shows us the full value of that number. What we want to happen is to format the number so that two decimal places are visible, and helpfully SwiftUI comes with a specialized string interpolation that lets us do just that. Replace the above code with this:

Section(header:
    Text("TOTAL: $\(totalPrice, specifier: "%.2f")")
) {

“%.2f” is the format code for “floating-point number with two digits after the decimal point”, and should make our UI look much better. If you’d like a challenge, why not try changing totalPrice to use a NumberFormatter?

Formatting interpolated strings in SwiftUI

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