Neatly printing integers interspersed with spaces

Question

The next iteration is here.

I have this small method for printing long integers neatly. For example:

neatify(123L)    = "123"
neatify(1234L)   = "1 234"
neatify(12345L)  = "12 345"
.
.
.

The code:

import java.util.Scanner;

public class Main {

    public static String neatify(final long number,
                                 final int groupLength) {
        final String str = Long.toString(number);

        if (groupLength < 1) {
            return str;
        }

        final char[] charArray = str.toCharArray();
        final StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

        for (int i = 0; i < charArray.length; ++i) {
            if (i != 0 && (charArray.length - i) % groupLength == 0) {
                sb.append(' ');
            }

            sb.append(charArray[i]);
        }

        return sb.toString();
    }

    public static String neatify(final long number) {
        return neatify(number, 3);
    }

    public static void main(final String... args) {
        final Scanner scanner = new Scanner(System.in);

        while (scanner.hasNextLong()) {
            System.out.println(neatify(scanner.nextLong()));
        }
    }
}

Answer 1

Usability

• do you really need the groupLength? I'm not aware of any number writing scheme where it is fixed, but not 3[*].
• on the other hand, the separator is different in a lot of countries. You can see an example for thousands separators here (or on wikipedia). For example, Canada uses , Italy uses ., the US uses ,, and Switzerland uses '. It might be nice to add that as a parameter instead of hardcoding . You can still use as a default.
• your code doesn't deal that well with negative numbers. -123 becomes - 123, and -123456 becomes - 123 456. I would not expect a space after the -.

_{[*] In India it seems to be written eg as 15,00,000, which doesn't use 3, but which also isn't a fixed length.}

Misc

• if you start your loop at 1 and prepend sb.append(charArray[0]);, you can save the i != 0 check you perform each time.