Comments on: NSDecimalNumber to NSXML and Back, A Cocoa Bug

By: Mike Zornek

Mike Zornek — Sun, 27 May 2007 01:37:56 +0000

@Grahm: For future XML exports yes, but I need to process XML already out in the wild right now. Thanks for the note though.

By: Graham Dennis

Graham Dennis — Sun, 27 May 2007 01:09:55 +0000

If you’re not trying to retain the decimal point, you may be better off writing the stringValue of the NSDecimalNumber instead of letting NSXMLNode encode it (incorrectly) for you. For NSDecimalNumbers like ‘90.0’, this will turn them into ‘90’, but you may or may not care about that.

By: Darkshadow

Darkshadow — Sat, 26 May 2007 23:07:21 +0000

I have a little code change that will get things working, but it has a possible gotcha. Since it's small, I'll just post the code here:

Starting at line 53 in your AppController.m file:

NSDictionary *localeDictionary = [[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] dictionaryRepresentation];
i = 0;
e = [[self numbers] objectEnumerator];
while (nextObject = [e nextObject]) {
    numberElement = (NSXMLElement *)[NSXMLNode elementWithName:@"number"];
    numberAttribute = (NSXMLElement *)[NSXMLNode elementWithName:@"value"];
    [numberAttribute setObjectValue:[[[self objectInNumbersAtIndex:i] valueForKey:@"originalNumber"]
        descriptionWithLocale:localeDictionary]];

....

The gotcha is that if the user happens to change their locale, this could give bad values (I haven't tested that, though).