No clear answer from Oracle

wazoox has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

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/,/\./
[download]

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

Comment on No clear answer from Oracle Select or Download Code

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Re: No clear answer from Oracle by gam3 (Curate) on Apr 15, 2005 at 21:17 UTC
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. `$dbh->do("ALTER SESSION SET NLS_NUMERIC_CHARACTERS = '.,'");` [download] -- gam3 A picture is worth a thousand words, but takes 200K.	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: No clear answer from Oracle by wazoox (Prior) on Apr 15, 2005 at 21:35 UTC
Thank you. Actually I read quite a lot of this doc (may CLOB burn in hell for ever) but I missed this part :)	[reply]
Re: No clear answer from Oracle by erix (Prior) on Apr 15, 2005 at 21:21 UTC
Can't you combine that NLS_LANG with setting NLS_NUMERIC_CHARACTERS (to `'.,'` or whatever you need), or set it with ALTER SESSION? (The NLS_NUMERIC_CHARACTERS value should contain decimal character and group separator.) update: changed to `'.,'`	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: No clear answer from Oracle by wazoox (Prior) on Apr 15, 2005 at 21:33 UTC
Thank you very much, I didn't know about these NLS_... whatever until today, so I still have a lot to learn :)	[reply]
Re: No clear answer from Oracle by starbolin (Hermit) on Apr 15, 2005 at 21:45 UTC
If the regex works I'd stick with that. (I don't think it's ugly at all. From what I get of LW's writings that is what Perl was ment to do.) Number::Format::Calc allows you do work directly with arbitrary formats but It looks like a lot of syntactic overload to me. YMMV. s//----->\t/;$~="JAPH";s//\r<$~~/;{s\|~$~-\|-~$~\|\|\|s \|-$~~\|$~~-\|\|\|s,<$~~,<~$~,,s,~$~>,$~~>,, $\|=1,select$,,$,,$,,1e-1;print;redo}	[reply]
Re^2: No clear answer from Oracle by wazoox (Prior) on Apr 16, 2005 at 13:10 UTC
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.	[reply]