At Allegro we use many open-source tools that support our work. Sometimes we are not able to find what we want and this is a perfect moment to fill the gap and to share with the community. We are proud to announce an initial release of Tradukisto — a small Java library created to convert numbers to their word representations.

Background and motivation

I work as a software developer in a team which delivers solutions for the financial department. Currently we are extracting the invoicing system from PHP monolith platform to the architecture of Java microservices. One of the business requirements we had was to display amount as text in given languages on invoices and other financial documents.

This is a quite common challenge. On the web there are many examples of code that does the job. The problem is that most of that code is not production ready.

We needed something that suits our needs. This tool should:

• support every language we use (Polish, Czech, Ukrainian, Russian, …),
• be available from maven repository, we definitely didn’t want to copy-paste some classes into our codebase,
• be still maintained and able to accept pull requests,
• be well tested.

We coudn’t find any tool that met all these requirements, so we decided to create Tradukisto. The origin of the name is quite straightforward. Esperanto was the first language we found in which a word “translator” sounds just right :).

Code samples

We’ve designed API of Tradukisto to be as simple as possible.

ValueConverter converter = ValueConverters.POLISH_INTEGER;
String valueAsWords = converter.asWords(1_234);

assertEquals("jeden tysiąc dwieście trzydzieści cztery", valueAsWords);

MoneyConverter converter = MoneyConverters.POLISH_BANKING_MONEY_VALUE;
String moneyAsWords = converter.asWords(new BigDecimal("1234.56"));

assertEquals("jeden tysiąc dwieście trzydzieści cztery PLN 56/100", moneyAsWords);

Current status, plans and source code

The only language currently supported is Polish. We are planning to add support for Czech, Ukrainian and Russian in the near future. Code is available via GitHub repository. We have attached code samples and an installation instruction as well.

Feel free to use this library and especially to participate.