Thread: proposal: numeric scale functions

Hi,

Dealing with "numeric"s right now in cases where it's really important 
that the scale is correct is quite painful.  For example, if I want to 
accept a EUR amount as an input, I often want to reject values such as 
'21.413', but I'd be fine with e.g. '21.410000'.  My suggestion is to 
add two functions: one to return the number of decimal places in a 
numeric, and another one to remove non-significant decimal places. 
These two functions are useful on their own, and when combined allow you 
to look at the number of significant decimal places in a numeric.

Any thoughts, objections?


.m

On 11/11/15 5:03 AM, Marko Tiikkaja wrote:
> Dealing with "numeric"s right now in cases where it's really important
> that the scale is correct is quite painful.  For example, if I want to
> accept a EUR amount as an input, I often want to reject values such as
> '21.413', but I'd be fine with e.g. '21.410000'.  My suggestion is to
> add two functions: one to return the number of decimal places in a
> numeric, and another one to remove non-significant decimal places.

I can see both of these being useful, but the terminology is not
correct.  The trailing zeroes are "significant".  Maybe the function
could be called "trim", in analogy to trimming whitespace off strings.