Re: lc_numeric and decimal delimiter

Gavin Sherry wrote:

>Hi all,
>
>I am at OpenDBCon in Germany. People are complaining about floats/numerics
>not accepting German/European conventions for the delimiter point -- a
>comma. This is hard coded into the the numeric input parser but,
>naturally, we use strtod() in else where. I'm not sure about the locale
>stuff and whether it deals with it. Are we in the wrong here?
>
>

If we are it is apparently by design. pg_locale.c says:

* The other categories, LC_MONETARY, LC_NUMERIC, and LC_TIME are also
* settable at run-time. However, we don't actually set those locale
* categories permanently. This would have bizarre effects like no
* longer accepting standard floating-point literals in some locales.
* Instead, we only set the locales briefly when needed, cache the
* required information obtained from localeconv(), and set them back.
* The cached information is only used by the formatting functions
* (to_char, etc.) and the money type.

Personally, I am inclined to think there should at least be a setting
that allows input according to locale settings, even if it would
disallow "standard" floating point strings. Maybe one of the protesting
Europeans would like to make a proposal?

cheers

andrew