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

Hi Monks,

I am writing a simple script, where I am counting a list of big numbers andtotaling them. Total count I am writing into excel file (using win32::ole for this).

The Totaling number is 4264859333. as you can see it's 10 digit. Instead of seeing this number in excel, I am seeing a negative number -30107963.

Have any one faced this before. Please help me to solve this problem. Thanks

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Problem with OLE Excel
by ikegami (Patriarch) on Jan 07, 2010 at 22:20 UTC
    Perl stored the number as an unsigned 2's complement, but something along the way treated it as an signed 2's complement 
    -30107963 + 2**32 = 4264859333

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    I don't know who exactly is at fault, and what can be done to fix it.

    Update: Forcing the number to be stored as a float internally might do the trick. The following does that: 

    $x = $x + 0.5 - 0.5;

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      He He Ho Ho Hi Hi ... It worked. force Storing it as float. Thank You Teacher :)

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      Thanks ikegami for the suggestion. One more thing just point out .. is that ... data is getting populated properly but at the time of formating the sheet it's gettig changed to negative number.

      Hmmm ... really typical behavior :)

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Re: Problem with OLE Excel
by gam3 (Curate) on Jan 08, 2010 at 00:04 UTC
    If you need even bigger numbers look at Math::BigInt.
    -- gam3
    A picture is worth a thousand words, but takes 200K.
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      I doubt OLE speaks in BigInts... Besides, at ten digits, he's nowhere near the point where they'd be needed. Perl and OLE can accurately represent with numbers up to 16 digits long, and they can represent numbers up to 308 digits long (with 53 bits of precision).

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      Hi,

      Yes, I agree with ikegami. as far I know Math::BigInt is for very big numbers. I don't need them as in my case highest is 11 digit number I have.

      anyways, thanks for your reply and suggestion 'gam3'.

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