The existing NumberFormat APIs provide features for formatting and parsing general numbers in various locales e.g. decimal, percent, scientific. Also, it has the support for formatting currencies. The support for formatting a number in its short/compact form is not available in the existing number formatting APIs. The resources provided by CLDR for formatting a number to its compact form can be utilized to add that support.

This RFE targets to support the short number formatting in JDK (http://cldr.unicode.org/translation/number-patterns#TOC-Short-Numbers). Here is the excerpt:

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Short Numbers

There are also patterns for compact forms of numbers, such as the such as "1M" and "1 million". The pattern may be substantially different across languages, as can be seen by comparing the English patterns to the Japanese patterns in the table below.

(chart follows in the link above)

LDML for compact number format: http://unicode.org/reports/tr35/tr35-numbers.html#Compact_Number_Formats