Problem adding comma & removing decimal

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

I've been using this subroutine for a while to add commas to a number, and truncate the decimal point & remainder. For some reason, it's not working for one of my scripts, while it's working perfectly fine in others. Can anyone see why the following code might not work?

my $testNumber = 123456.789;
$testNumber = addComma($testNumber);
print $testNumber;

sub addComma {
    my $number = $_[0];
    $number = reverse $number; 
    $number =~ s/(\d\d\d)(?=\d)(?!\d*\.)/$1,/g; 
    $number = reverse $number;
    return $number;
}
[download]

returns:
123,456.789

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thx, monks!

Steny

Comment on Problem adding comma & removing decimal Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Problem adding comma & removing decimal by davido (Cardinal) on Jun 05, 2004 at 05:04 UTC
`sub addComma { my $number = reverse int shift; $number =~ s/(\d{3})(?=\d)(?!\d*\.)/$1,/g; return scalar reverse $number; }` [download] Partial credit goes to the Perl Cookbook, and the rest to int instead of a RE. Dave	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Problem adding comma & removing decimal by Steny (Sexton) on Jun 05, 2004 at 06:01 UTC
Thx a ton! That works perfectly :-)	[reply]
Re^2: Problem adding comma & removing decimal by bart (Canon) on Jun 05, 2004 at 06:17 UTC
I don't see any significant difference with the code he was using (apart from the `int`). To the OP: I think that if it fails, it's probably to blame to the format of the "numberstring" you're passing to this sub.	[reply]
Re^3: Problem adding comma & removing decimal by davido (Cardinal) on Jun 05, 2004 at 07:08 UTC
His method was failing for lack of int. That was the significant change. The negative lookahead assertion was rejecting the string when it reached the part of the string that had a decimal point. That caused the substitutions to stop before the string was done being commafied, and did nothing for eliminating the decimal portion. Dave	[reply]