hack to fix broken number_to_currency in ruby on rails

The rails function number_to_currency for some reason puts the negative sign after the currency symbol. So you get this kind of thing: $-123.55 instead of -$123.55.

Someone wrote a patch for this, see here, but it seems to have been forgotten. So here is my dirty hack.

I put it in module ApplicationHelper in app/helpers/application_helper.rb.

  # The number_to_currency function puts the negative sign after the dollar sign instead of before it.
  # This is a hack to fix that behaviour. Use at your own risk. It shouldn't cause harm when used with
  # other currencies, but it won't fix the negative sign unless it finds $- at the start of the string.
  def number_to_currency_fix_negative(number, options={})
    number_to_currency(number, options).sub(/^\$-/, '-$')
  end

It could be improved obviously to work with currencies other than dollars.

And for convenience you might like to do a monkey patch version of this fix. I leave that as an exercise...

(Disclaimer: Written by a rails noob).