conversion of char to decimal

[mapleleafblue]

All,

I have a problem and am struggling to be honest. I have a program that has a series of char values that are read from a file and stored in a database table. The program is using embedded sql.

I have an amount that is read from the file into char as 000000300000

This value represents 3000.00 in decimal or double or whatever value is best to use.

I want to use the value 3000.00. Is there a function that simply takes the char and moves it to the required format.

Can I simply use sprintf with a specific flag ?

[C_ntua]

000000300000, meaning what? A char is a 1byte variable. It has a maximum value of 256 (-128/128 for unsigned).
If the above is a text file then you mean a sequence of characters, usually referred as sting. In that case you can use strtod() (google it) to convert a string to double.

Now, there is no way to understand that the last two digits need a period to have actually 0000003000.00. But that is no problem. Just divide by 100.

Give some code if you want or verify that you are actually doing what I suspect

edit: You can also use sscnaf() or scanf() to convert data to appropriate format. It is %s for string and %lf for double

[mapleleafblue]

Well I suppose I could be a bit more specific :- Here goes ::

I have a question for you that you might be able to answer.

I have a string value amount that is read from a file as "00000300000" which actually means £3000 or the euro equivalent.

It is read from the datafile like so strncpy(amount, &record[35], 11); Where record[35] is the position in the datafile.

It is manipulated later on in the program like so to produce the field with the decimal place.

Inside a function extract

declare
char amountx[12];

char *amount;

for(;
{
if (!(*cur))
break;
narrative = (*cur)->narrative;
amount = (*cur)->amount;
date = (*cur)->date;
sprintf(amountx,"%s\n",amount);
amountx[11] = amount[10];
amountx[10] = amount[9];
amountx[9] = '.';


which produces 000003000.00

What I want to do is now remove the leading zeros from this string and maybe even do some multiplication with it.

The result I want to achieve is to use the variable in an sql statement to compare it to a value stored as a decimal in the format

3000.00

for e.g where paymentamount = :amountx

Hopefully you may have a function or a command I can use that will strip the leading zeros or alternatively allow me to pad the paymentamount field to have zeros.

Hopefully not too confused.

[Adak]

So you don't want to use the string to double abilities that C has? Odd, but you can just put your string into a while loop to knock off the leading zero's:

i = 0;
while(stringArray[i] == 0)  {
   for(j = 1; j < 12; j++)
      stringArray[j-1] = stringArray[j];
   i++;
}

Haven't run this, but it looks OK.

[mapleleafblue]

Sorry Adak,

I had pretty much forgotten about this thread. Thanks for the advice.

I used atof to do it in the end. The where clause in the sql doesn't need to be explicit and as long as the variable becomes a double it works nicely.

double new_amount=0;
printf("A new_amount \t%g\n",new_amount += atof(amount)/10);

To check the value of new amount I can do a printf as follows :-

printf("B new_amount%8.2f\n",new_amount);

Speak soon.

;-)