JavaScript Chart.js – Custom data formatting to display on tooltip

For chart.js 2.0+, this has changed (no more tooltipTemplate/multiTooltipTemplate). For those that just want to access the current, unformatted value and start tweaking it, the default tooltip is the same as:

options: {
    tooltips: {
        callbacks: {
            label: function(tooltipItem, data) {
                return tooltipItem.yLabel;
            }
        }
    }
}

I.e., you can return modifications to tooltipItem.yLabel, which holds the y-axis value. In my case, I wanted to add a dollar sign, rounding, and thousands commas for a financial chart, so I used:

options: {
    tooltips: {
        callbacks: {
            label: function(tooltipItem, data) {
                return "$" + Number(tooltipItem.yLabel).toFixed(0).replace(/./g, function(c, i, a) {
                    return i > 0 && c !== "." && (a.length - i) % 3 === 0 ? "," + c : c;
                });
            }
        }
    }
}