How to switch floating decimal number char from "." to "," ?

[Pete Sammet]

As I found out by default Perl produces floating point number output as

123456.78

where ".78" is the fraction part of the number.

However in Europe another format is used:

123456,78

How exactly can I switch from the first to the second format?

I read a solution with

$myvar ~= tr/./,/;

but I don't want such a "afterwork" transformation.

The output should AUTOMATICALLY contain "," even during the calculation:

$num = 5/4;
print $num;

should show 1,25

Pete

 

[Denis McMahon]

where ".78" is the fraction part of the number.

However in Europe another format is used:

123456,78

First hit of google for "perl locale" looked relevant.

Rgds

Denis McMahon

 

[Martijn Lievaart]

This is a bad plan. Locales (specifically, the 'locale' pragma) and
Unicode don't play nicely together in Perl, and if you're processing
international text you will probably end up with Unicode strings. A

Can you expand on this? What exactly goes wrong (or is unexpected)?

M4

 

[Martijn Lievaart]

(snip)

Confused yet?

That's just plain buggy I would say, or is there some logic I don't see?

Besides, your examples did not work for me completely, to get the same
regex matching I had to set LANG as well.

M4

 

[Martijn Lievaart]

No, it's just plain buggy. The bugs have been there since 5.8.0, they
are well known, and the only reason they haven't been fixed yet is
because it's extremely difficult (both to work out what the behaviour
*should* be, and to write the actual code). The problem *is* currently
being worked on (mostly by Karl Williamson), but don't hold your breath.

Thx for the info.

/me writes down after "never use threads in Perl", "never use locales in
Perl".

I get the problem, but it does suck.

You probably had LANG set in your environment already, which I don't.
IIRC LANG overrides LC_ALL.

Ah, that explains it.

M4

 

[Peter J. Holzer]

That's just plain buggy I would say, or is there some logic I don't see?

The logic is that if you use locale then byte strings are supposed to be
encoded according to the current locale. This affects only regexps and
string comparisons according to perldoc locale. It could be argued that
it should also affect implicit upgrading to character strings.

Besides, your examples did not work for me completely, to get the same
regex matching I had to set LANG as well.

That looks like a bug. LC_ALL is supposed to override LANG.

hp