Problems with decimal point (gnucash 1.4.8, LANG=de_CH)

[Niklaus Giger]

Am Donnerstag,  4. Januar 2001 00.22 schrieb Dave Peticolas:
> Niklaus Giger writes:
> > I start using gnucash for my personal accounting this year.
> >
> > Now it bothers me (I didn't notice it when I tested gnucash last July)
> > that "." is used as a thousand separator instead of the decimal point.
> >
> > My environment is as follows:
> > Debian (+/- unstable)
> > KDE2 as GUI
> > gnucash 1.4.8
> > I have enter manually in my shell "export LANG=de_CH; export LANGUAGE=de"
> > before starting gnucash in order to make gnucash recognize my preferred
> > language.
> >
> > Is there a problem with my setup or with gnucash?
>
> I don't think so -- on my system, LANG=de_CH gives you a locale
> where '.' is the thousands separator and ',' is the decimal point.
>
> If you want to switch back, but still use the 'de' translations, use
>
> export LANG=de_CH
> export LC_MONETARY=en_US
>
> dave
Thank you for your advice. This is a good work-around. 

Ralph F. De Witt MBA wrote
>I believe that the european standard is to use the , or thousands seperator 
>were we use the . period and the period were we use the ,. That is the 
>european standard is just the reverse of the american standard in this case. 
>So I believe that Gnucash is working correctly.

This belief is wrong. In Germany the thousands separator is "." but in 
Switzerland it is " ". Also in Germany the decimal point is "," and in 
Switzerland it is ".". I do not know what other combinations are also 
possible.

If you use the KDE control center it is easy to see the effect of changing 
the country from "Germany" to "Switzerland", while keeping the language. But 
I am not a specialist in "locales", but I think there should be somewhere a 
correct way of deducing it.

Unfortunately I am very busy with some other projects but I hope to hove more 
time in February or March to help sort things out. 

Regards

-- 
Niklaus Giger
Wieshoschet 6
CH-8753 Mollis
ngiger@mus.ch  Tel. + 41 55 618 64 68, Private + 41 55 612 20 54