No clear answer from Oracle

[wazoox]

HI dear fellow monks. I'm in trouble writing a pretty big application using Oracle. Here's what's going fishy : working in France, I need some text fields in the database to accept accents ( é à è and friends). So I had to add $ENV{NLS_LANG}='french_france.WE8ISO8859P15'; Before I connect to Oracle. Well, unfortunately there is an annoying side effect : now Oracle returns the floating-point numbers with a comma... Yes, in France the official separator between the integer and floating part is a comma. So  print $toto which used to return 0.45678 now returns what perl calls a "non numeric value" :,45678. I managed that with an atrocious

$toto =~ s/,/\./

But isn't there a better (and less ugly) way?

[gam3]

From DBD::Oracle

A slightly more subtle problem can occur with NUMBER types. The default NLS settings might format numbers with a fullstop (".") to separate thousands and a comma (",") as the decimal point. Perl will generate warnings and use incorrect values when numbers, returned and formatted as strings in this way by Oracle, are used in a numeric context. You could explicitly convert each numeric value using the TO_CHAR(...) function but that gets tedious very quickly. The best fix is to change the NLS settings. That can be done for an individual connection with the code below.

$dbh->do("ALTER SESSION SET NLS_NUMERIC_CHARACTERS = '.,'");

[wazoox]

Thank you. Actually I read quite a lot of this doc (may CLOB burn in hell for ever) but I missed this part :)

[erix]

Can't you combine that NLS_LANG with setting NLS_NUMERIC_CHARACTERS (to '.,' or whatever you need), or set it with ALTER SESSION?

(The NLS_NUMERIC_CHARACTERS value should contain decimal character and group separator.)

update: changed to '.,'

[wazoox]

Thank you very much, I didn't know about these NLS_... whatever until today, so I still have a lot to learn :)

[starbolin]

If the regex works I'd stick with that. (I don't think it's ugly at all. From what I get of LW's writings that is what Perl was ment to do.) Number::Format::Calc allows you do work directly with arbitrary formats but It looks like a lot of syntactic overload to me. YMMV.

[wazoox]

Well the regexp "just works" but I feel uneasy with it (treating a number as a chain to convert it back to number... blech). I'll keep it if I can't tweak the $ENV... Thanks.