Outputting numbers as words - MySQL with Perl or PHP

Main Content

Outputting numbers as words - MySQL with Perl or PHP

Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2007-06-17 07:25:23 - Graham Ellis
Oracle's in_char function lets you convert numbers into a text string, but it's an unusual facility to have as as built-in; there's no such facility (as far as I know) in MySQL but you can get around this easily enough within your controlling application - the Nums2Words module on the CPAN (in Perl), and a similar module on the PEAR (for PHP users) does all the hard work for you.

Here's a Perl example:

use Nums2Words;

@testvals = (7, 12, 153, -19, 1234007, 0.7,

  3.1415, 666.62, -176.75, 10.6e15);

foreach $number(@testvals) {

  $t1 = ucfirst(lc(num2word($number)));

  print "$number = $t1\n";

  }

When you run that, you get

earth-wind-and-fire:~/jun07 grahamellis$ perl n2w

7 = Seven

12 = Twelve

153 = One hundred fifty-three

-19 = Negative nineteen

1234007 = One million, two hundred thirty-four thousand, seven

0.7 = Zero and seven tenths

3.1415 = Three and one thousand, four hundred fifteen ten-thousandths

666.62 = Six hundred sixty-six and sixty-two hundredths

-176.75 = Negative one hundred seventy-six and seventy-five hundredths

1.06e+16 = One and six thousand, sixteen millionths

earth-wind-and-fire:~/jun07 grahamellis$

A web search lead me to similar code in Java, and no doubt there's someting in the Cheeseshop if you're a Python programmer. Lesson to be learnt - look around before you re-write code!