Bug #17079 [Com]: setlocale changes the internal representation of floats

Edit report at https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=17079&edit=1 ID: 17079 Comment by: schindler dot andor at empo dot deletethis dot hu Reported by: jonathan at tricolon dot com Summary: setlocale changes the internal representation of floats Status: Not a bug Type: Bug Package: Scripting Engine problem Operating System: Red Hat Linux 7.1 PHP Version: 4.3.0 RC2 Assigned To: hholzgra Block user comment: N Private report: N New Comment: Yes, this is not a bug. This is a huge epic fail. This is a great example, why people hate PHP. Previous Comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2004-10-23 16:58:47] erki at lap dot ttu dot ee Having the setlocale function in string.c execute if ((lc.decimal_point)[0] != '.') { /* set locale back to C */ setlocale(LC_NUMERIC, "C"); } is not a solution. The particular "fix" broke other things. In many countries, comma is used as a decimal separator. Case in point: 3 weeks ago, a certain financial database of a major telco company in Europe was upgraded to use PHP 4.3.8 (formerly 4.2.2). The system uses Oracle for persistence, where the decimal separator is a comma, as is a custom in that country. So numbers came in from Oracle, and then PHP was unable to process them correctly. For example, if a client had a debt of 25,12€, and the client paid 5€, then the comparison ($paid_amount > $debt) said incorrectly that the paid amount was more than the debt. Result: hundreds of wasted man-hours. In the end we recompiled PHP without that "fix". ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2003-07-05 06:13:19] dMNz at one dot lt am pabandymuj.. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2003-03-24 10:18:13] moriyoshi@php.net Related discussion: http://news.php.net/article.php?group=php.dev&article=95211 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2003-01-02 13:58:52] php at zeguigui dot com I switched to PHP 4.3 (in dev only) and I saw this change in locale handling. It is not OS dependant as I have the problem with Windows XP. In PHP < 4.3.0 I have a MySQL database with floats. To handle those floats I had to make some convertions (with str_replace) as results were not locale dependant (I use fr_FR). For instance if I had 1.234 stored in db, $row = mysql mysql_fetch_row($handle) would return in $row[0] the value "1.234" and $row[0] * 100 would return 100 whereas of 123,4 (if outputed). In PHP = 4.3.0 I do not need those convertion routines anymore (it was a workaround in my opinion). So starting with PHP 4.3: $a = 1.234 ==> OK whatever locale is $b = "1.234" ==> OK whatever locale is $c = "1,234" ==> NOT OK whatever locale is If I have some user inputs I have to convert from locale representation to number representation before processing them... it would be great to have a function that do the job for us (didn't find one, sorry!)... but maybe that's not the good place to ask for this! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2003-01-02 10:13:59] martin at mermaidconsulting dot com I also ran across this problem and have been messing with it for like 3 days before i finally ran across this post. If you do not consider it a bug I would recommend you at least include it in the documentation and make it very clear that you cannot perform calculations using thousands-seperators based on the locale settings. If you have a look at the following sample you can see that user-inputs will get totally messed up in case they use thousand-seperators. <? setlocale(LC_NUMERIC, "en_US") ; // setting the numeric locale to us-conventions setlocale(LC_MONETARY, "en_US") ; // setting the monetary locale to us-conventions $locale_info = localeconv(); echo "mon_decimal_point: {$locale_info["mon_decimal_point"]}<br>"; // displays the monetary decimal point used for the locale echo "mon_thousands_sep: {$locale_info["mon_thousands_sep"]}<br>"; // displays the monetary thousands seperator used for the locale echo "decimal_point: {$locale_info["decimal_point"]}<br>"; // displays the decimal point used for the locale echo "thousands_sep: {$locale_info["thousands_sep"]}<br>"; // displays the thousands seperator used for the locale // defines 2 variables that should be 1000000 and 750000 $a = "1,000,000"; $b = "750,000"; print "A = $a<br>"; print "B = $b<br>"; // performing a simple calculation that illustrates how PHP handles the numbers print "A * 1 = " . ($a*1) . "<br>"; print "B * 1 = " . ($b*1) . "<br>"; ?> Imho there is no point in having locale settings for currencies and numeric values if you cannot use it for doing calculations. Thanks /Martin ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The remainder of the comments for this report are too long. To view the rest of the comments, please view the bug report online at https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=17079 -- Edit this bug report at https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=17079&edit=1