Re: to_number, to_char inconsistency.

On Thu, May 14, 2015 at 01:02:01PM -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 10, 2013 at 06:27:02PM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> > Jeremy Lowery <jslowery(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> > > I load and dump text files with currency values in it. The decimal in these
> > > input and output formats in implied. The V format character works great for
> > > outputing numeric data:
> >
> > > # select to_char(123.45, '999V99');
> > > to_char
> > > ---------
> > > 12345
> > > (1 row)
> >
> > > However, when importing data, the V doesn't do the same thing:
> >
> > > # select to_number('12345', '999V99');
> >
> > A look at the source code shows that to_number doesn't do anything at
> > all with the V format code, so this isn't terribly surprising. It
> > wouldn't be very hard to make it do the right thing, probably, but
> > nobody's had that particular itch yet. Feel free to scratch it and
> > send a patch ...
>
> (This is for 9.6.)
>
> I have developed the attached patch to support 'V' with to_number().
> Oracle doesn't support that, so we are on our own in defining the API.
>
> The patch doesn't handle non-whole-number strings very well as there is
> no way for the user to specify decimal precision because we have
> overridden the decimal digit meaning, but that seems fine to me as most
> users will be using whole numbers.

Patch applied.

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Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> http://momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com

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