Re: casting Bangla characters to NUMERIC

Bob Jolliffe <bobjolliffe@gmail.com> writes:
> I have an interesting problem.  I have a string field in a table which
> (sometimes) is expected to contain numeric values  ie. a cast of the
> field to INTEGER is supposed to succeed.

> My issue is that the application is running in Bangladesh, and
> sometimes the users have entered values using Bangla characters.  eg.
> "৮" rather than "8".  (Note that this shouldnt have been possible to
> enter in the first place, but we can ignore that for now.  They are
> there, I have to somehow deal with it.)

> Is there a way with LOCALE settings to get this cast to work
> correctly?

Doubt it :-(.  ISTM it's certainly outside the charter of int4in to
do that.  Ideally to_number() would handle it, but I don't think it
does at the moment.  Probably your best bet is to translate those
characters to regular ASCII digits using replace(), then cast.
It'd be a bit tedious, but fortunately there are only 10 cases
to consider, and you could wrap that up in a function.

            regards, tom lane