isNumeric function?

On Mon, 2004-07-26 at 09:52, Jerry LeVan wrote:

Is there a (relatively) simple way to tell if a column
is a "numeric" type other than comparing against the
seven or so oids which may or may not be the complete
list of things genererally considered to be numeric?

I need this info to determine whether or not to justify
left or right in a data display.

No, in fact it's more complicated than your example. You'd also want to
consider which type a domain maps down to. There really isn't anything
you can do to know if an extended type is a simple numeric (without
running a regex on all the output data -- which is beyond icky). For
formatting you'd probably not want to consider composite types or arrays
as numeric even if they're totally composed of a builtin numeric base
type.

So, in addition to keeping a list of "pg_type.typname"s you consider
numeric, you'd also want UNION "pg_type.typbasetype" WHERE
"pg_type.typtype" = 'd' among some other restrictions.

See http://www.postgresql.org/docs/7.4/static/catalog-pg-type.html for
more info.

As you said this was in an application, your DB driver may automatically
map output types to SQL defined ones. If this is the case you might
consider just relying on your driver's mapping.