A normal scenario with Knockout is that you want date and number observables to be formatted to the current culture of the client, this is easily implemented in a Knockout extender, something like.

ko.extenders.numeric = function(observable, options) {
    var textValue = null;
    return ko.computed({
        write: function(value) {
            textValue = value;
            var parsed = Number.parseFloat(value);
            if(!isNaN(parsed)) {
                observable(parsed);
            } else {
                observable(null);
            }
        },
        read: function() {
            var value = observable();
            if(value == null) {
                return textValue;
            }

            return value.toLocaleString(); //This  can be replaced with for example the Globalize plugin 
        }
    });
};

Use it like

this.amount = ko.observable().extend({ numeric: true });

The problem with this approach is that the ViewModel will no longer work against numbers it will work against formatted strings, so this.amount() will return a string instead of a number. This is very bad practice in a View/ViewModel seperation stand point. (more…)