Last night I received a real brain twister of a question from @ganarce on my Twitter page. He wanted to know if there was a way to align data within a table using a decimal point “.”. Seemed like a fairly routine type of formatting (invoices, data etc.). Without massaging the data ahead of time to all have the same number of characters before or after the decimal point.

I went to the W3C to for an explanation on horizontal alignment. Ah ha! there it was. Easy enough:

col align=”char” char=”.”

Unfortunately there is little or no support for this attribute amongst the Browser community. I found a method using JQuery that seems to work with IE, FF and Chrome.

Happy formatting!