http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=852539


in reply to Change decimal point temporarily

my $s = 123.45;
$s =~ s/\./,/;

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Re^2: Change decimal point temporarily
by lima1 (Curate) on Aug 02, 2010 at 21:01 UTC
    I was unclear. It should work automatically. With a regex, I first have to test whether it is a numeric field. Obviously, I don't want to replace points in text columns.
[reply]
      use Scalar::Util qw( looks_like_number );

my $s = 123.45;
$s =~ s/\./,/ if looks_like_number($s);

      [download]

      Works even better than setlocale because you are surely starting with the number in string form if you don't know whether a column contains a number or not.

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[d/l]
        use Scalar::Util qw( looks_like_number );
print looks_like_number('12,48');
# --> 0

        [download]
        He's PARSING a csv (or more probably a tab or semicolon separated file) so he needs to go exactly the other way around. Accept 12,48 and treat it as a number.

        Jenda
        Enoch was right!
        Enjoy the last years of Rome.

[reply]
[d/l]
      Or... I suppose if we have a digit either size of a '.' then it's probably a number with a decimal point: 
      $s = "123.45";
$s =~ s/(?<=\d)\.(?=\d)/,/;

      [download]
      ALthough... I don't quite understand what you're trying to do - surely if you're parsing a CSV file containing numbers with decimal points you'd rather they weren't commas?
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[d/l]
        The motivation is a feature for the module described in RFC: Text::CSV::R. It is an option to set the decimal point. In Germany for example, it is common for CSV files to use a comma as decimal point and a semicolon as field separator.

        So I guess a locale approach would be the performance-wise fastest solution. But setting the locale to an arbitrary locale which uses a comma (de_DE, fr_Fr,...) just to change this single parameter seems like hack.

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