Re: Locale problem

[David Jones <drj@...>]

On Feb 05, 2004, at 17:23, Stoil Todorov wrote:

> First, thanks for support!:-)
> Second I still have problems with locals:-(
> In code, I call os.setlocale("C", "numeric") in first
> line, because I use data with decimal point, but I get
> error message: "Syntax error during pre-compilation.:
> [string "Run_Code"]:144: malformed number near `0.05'"
> How can I avoid this?

I'm not entirely sure, but I think the following is what is happening:

You need to make sure that the locale is changed before the Lua chunk 
is compiled.

This is probably best achieved by calling

setlocale(LC_NUMERIC, "C")

in your C program before loading/compiling/running any Lua code.  
You'll need to #include <locale.h> as well.  Early on in main() is 
probably a good place.

If you must do it in Lua then you need to execute

os.setlocale('c', 'numeric')

in a separate chunk to the rest of your code.  I don't how your Lua 
code and your host application are organised, but putting that in a 
separate file or string that is executed before other Lua code should 
work.

It doesn't work to put os.setlocale('c', 'numeric') in the Lua file 
that you want to use decimal points in.  That's because the file has 
been lexed and compiler before the locale has changed, so the lexer - 
the part that recognises numbers - will use the old locale.  I should 
have spotted that before.

Hope this helps.

David Jones