Incorrect locale number formats: they're out there

[sidewayss]

For example, I live in Costa Rica. Here, based on what I've seen in my bank statements and the bank's online apps, official gazette publications, and based on a conversation with a lawyer here, the official thousands separator is period. Yet Intl.NumberFormat with locale set to es-CR uses space as the thousands separator. A google search yields similar information.

If I go to an official Ministerio de Hacienda document to find numbers formatted with currency, I see a mix of period and space as the thousands separator. Periods in the paragraphs, spaces in the tables. My guess is that the paragraphs were typed in by a person, whereas the tables were formatted by MS Excel using es-CR as the locale. In which case the locale setting is just wrong.

Not to mention that in everyday life the de facto standard is the Anglo comma for thousands and period for decimals.

Reviewing and validating all the locales is a big job and not really my business. I wanted to note this for anyone who encounters similar discrepancies.