Number Conversion Problems...Scientific Notation!

From: Mark Tortolano <mark_tortolano_at_dial.pipex.com>
Date: Wed, 27 May 1998 17:15:29 GMT
Message-ID: <356c4880.30373300@news.supernews.com>

Hi,

I have a NUMBER(20) field in a table that I use to hold a unique identifier for each row. However, whenever the numbers get beyond a certain length, Oracle represents them in scientific notation, like so:-

1.0120E+15

when the number is actually:-

1012049377441410

This is giving me a real problem, as I need to get hold of the full number. I then tried to use TO_CHAR(field_name,20), which appeared to give the correct results in my view. When I used DBI to interface to Perl, though, I found that the results of the TO_CHAR mean that the number was padded with lots of spaces on the left side, ie.

' 1012049377441410'

This is no good either. Does anyone know how I can get the full number without having the leading spaces?

Thanks in advance,

Mark Tortolano Received on Wed May 27 1998 - 12:15:29 CDT