Thanks Tom. That is what I expected to hear. Was being hopeful ... On Mon, 25 Nov 2019 at 16:27, Tom Lane <tgl@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Bob Jolliffe <bobjolliffe@xxxxxxxxx> 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
