CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c++excellocaledecimal-point
Oedo808
Oedo808

Reputation: 58

Incorrect conversion when decimal point embedded in VT_BSTR and German locale used

I have a piece of code(c++) that is writing some floating point values to excel like this:

...
values[ position ].bstrVal = formattedValue;
values[ position ].vt = VT_BSTR;
...

as you can see those floating point values are stored in the form of string and the decimal point is formatted in different ways, for example: "110.000000", "20.11" etc. (this example is for English locale)

Now it works perfectly when English locale is used. However when I switch to German locale in the Control Panel the decimal point is changed to "," (and that's fine) but after passing those localized strings to Excel they are not correctly converted. For example in case of writing "110,000000" I'm getting 100 millions in excel. Other values like "20,11" stay as a text.

The only way to fix this is to overwrite the decimal point with "." in my program before writing to Excel. Any ideas why the conversion is not locale-aware when using VT_BSTR?

I should also add that I tried to switch the locale in my program from default one to German - still no luck.

Thank you in advance

Upvotes: 0

Views: 426

Answers (1)

Hans Passant
Hans Passant

Reputation: 942020

It is never a good idea to let Excel guess at the value type. Do not use VT_BSTR, a currency value should be of variant type VT_CY. Assign the cyVal member with the value. It is an 8 byte integer value (int64 member of type LONGLONG), the currency amount multiplied by 10,000. Ten thousand :)

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions