How to change decimal separator cleanly in outputs in mysql - php combo

Question

I was trying to export database query to CSV and the need arised to use different decimal comma. It seems impossible to change the decimal comma in MySQL, so I tried in PHP:

setlocale(LC_NUMERIC, "cs_CZ");

But it seems that all the database functions like mysql_fetch_row and mysql_fetch_assoc are retrieving data of type string instead of double:

$res = mysql_query("select 50/3");
$row = mysql_fetch_row($res);
var_dump($row); // $row[0] is of type "string"

So in general PHP already doesn't have data of type double, but only strings!

So is there some general, clean way to specify output of the decimal point?

I ended up converting the strings using str_replace('.', ',', $row[0]) but this is ugly for two reasons:

• you have to know which field is of type double
• it's a dirty string job.

Answer 1

I don't know which database client/driver you're using but there is something like mysql_field_type^­Docs which gives you the type based on it's offset, like 0.

This should do the job to find out if a certain column needs re-formatting or not.

To reformat, there is number_format^­Docs.

With these you can do the conversion automatically.

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Edit: Regarding your comments:

If you want to get PHP datatypes mapped, consider using the MySQL Native Driver^­Docs. Use it together with PDO:

Advantages of using mysqlnd for PDO

mysqlnd returns native data types when using Server-side Prepared Statements, for example an INT column is returned as an integer variable not as a string. That means fewer data conversions internally. ^Source

So depending of what you try to achieve, use the right tool.

See as well the multiple options you have when fetching data from a PDO Statement^­Docs.

Answer 2

// French notation
$nombre_format_francais = number_format($number, 2, ',', ' ');

Answer 3

Try

number_format($row[0], 2, ",", ".");

That should change the format of the number. (german format)