Override jQuery function for custom behavior (say getter and setter)

A new day and a new, very intelligent idea from the client which he presented to us with great confidence. After we are done with the development of the page, he told us to change the display format of the currency on the change and that to on some of the labels which display amount. So the amount 1000000.00 should look something like 1,000,000.00 in labels. Obviously, we perform some calculation based on these label values. So setting and getting the values for these labels would have been a lot of changes on the script file.

As the changes were for a particular page and the requirement was likely to be change soon ( that's why we say, Experience counts :-) ), I was looking for possible solutions. My initial thought was to create two separate function. One to convert the amount into the desired format and set the value to label. And other one to fetch the value from label, remove the comma and return the numeric value. Problem with this approach was a lot of change in entire code file. There is even chances that i could have missed to call these functions somewhere.

So I thought, why not modify the default text() function of jQuery. That way, I need to write only the extended functions and without even single line of code change in file, I should be able to meet the requirements. So after a bit of efforts, I came up with this code -

<script type="text/javascript">
 
(funtion($) {
        /* Keep original function to execute later. */
        var oldTextFunction = $.fn.text;

        /* Override the jQuery function */
        $.fn.text = function(value) {
            /* Apply this code only to 'span' tags with 'format-amount' class */
            if ($(this).is('span') && $(this).hasClass("format-amount") {
                    /* Setter */
                    if (value) {
                        /* replace orignal amount with formatter amount */
                        value = value.toString().replace(/(\d)(?=(\d\d\d)+(?!\d)/g, "$1,");
                        arguments[0] = value;
                    }
                    /* Getter */
                    else {
                        /* Remove comma from the formatter text. */
                        var formattedText = '';
                        formattedText = jQuery.text(this);
                        if (formattedText) {
                            var find = ',';
                            var regex = new RegExp(find, 'g');
                            formattedText = formattedText.replace(regex, '');
                        }
                        return formattedText;
                    }
                }
                /* Call original function */
                return oldTextFunction.apply(this, arguments);
            };

        })(jQuery);
 
</script> 

That's how, I found the quick fix which is working pretty good till now. Ofcourse, there will be many better solutions to my quick fix. Do tell us how we can implement that.