Re: GetValue(), floats, and locales

"Jeroen T. Vermeulen" <jtv(at)xs4all(dot)nl> writes:
> I just got a bothersome bug report from a libpqxx user in Hungary (where,
> as it turns out, floating-point numbers are written with decimal commas
> rather than decimal points). It appears that libpq's GetValue() delivers
> floating-point fields in localized format. The problem with this is that
> libpqxx then tries to parse the numbers using sscanf(), which apparently
> doesn't expect the number to have a decimal comma.

> This begs the question: is it libpq that represents these values using the
> client's locale, or does the server ship them in this form according to
> its own locale?

The server should always ship floats in "standard" representation.
AFAIK the only way to use localized numeric representations is to
write to_char() and to_number() calls (or use the money datatype).
If you can show us a case where plain float display does the other,
it's a bug.

libpq is not doing anything to you, in any case: it's far too stupid
to convert data at all ;-)

regards, tom lane