> Not in my experience.. The europeans i know usually write € 123,40.
Your experience is a minority, and most likely sourced in a country which doesn't use the Euro as its currency (like the UK)
By and large, European locales (this is orthogonal to language) put the € sign at the same place they put their previous currency signs, and for most of them it's after: the Dutch, Austrians, Cypriots, Irish, Liechtensteiner, Latvian and Maletese use the prefix form, everybody else uses postfix (about 80% of EU population, slightly more than that wrt Euro-using countries as the UK amounts for 12.5% of the EU population but doesn't use the Euro)
That table claims it follows the value in Germany, that is not entirely correct.
Colloquially, EUR values are expressed with the currency symbol following the value, but in nearly all business correspondence (i.e. invoices, contracts, etc), it is actually prefixed and in many cases (likely for historical compatibility reasons) spelled out.
In other words, in day-to-day use you'd likely see this:
123,40 €
In more formal situations and invoices you'd expect this:
EUR 123,40
I'm not sure whether this split pre-dates the Euro. I recall seeing "DM 123,40" before the Euro, but I was too young to pay much attention to that kind of thing. Most signage used "123,40 DM" or even "12 Pf." (for Pfennig, the equivalent of cents) or left it off entirely, I think.
Your experience is a minority, and most likely sourced in a country which doesn't use the Euro as its currency (like the UK)
By and large, European locales (this is orthogonal to language) put the € sign at the same place they put their previous currency signs, and for most of them it's after: the Dutch, Austrians, Cypriots, Irish, Liechtensteiner, Latvian and Maletese use the prefix form, everybody else uses postfix (about 80% of EU population, slightly more than that wrt Euro-using countries as the UK amounts for 12.5% of the EU population but doesn't use the Euro)
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_issues_concerning_th... for a reasonably complete table.