Dots appearing in place of commas in number fields in forms and reports

I saw this posted in Metalink AOL forum:

From: Geeta Kolla 06-Nov-07 20:37
Subject: Number format flipped commas and periods on screen and reports


Number format flipped commas and periods on screen and reports

Every so often, maybe once every week or so, one of the users will experience *flipped* commas and periods in their dollar values.

EXAMPLE: what should be $1,234.56 instead appears as $1.234,56

It happens on both screen as well as reports.

Any ideas, please let me know.

My reply:

From Metalink Note 333785.1 (Internationalization Guide for Apps 11i):

When a number is displayed in digits, country-specific conventions determine how that number is entered and displayed. For example, the number "one million" is usually represented as 1,000,000.00 in the United States and United Kingdom, with the period (.) being used as the decimal separator, or radix, and the comma (,) being used as the grouping separator between thousands. In contrast, many European countries use the comma as the decimal separator and the period as the grouping separator, so "one million" is usually represented as 1.000.000,00.

Number Format Support enables the characters used for the decimal separator and grouping separator to be changed to suit user preference when numbers are entered or displayed. This is referred to as a multi-radix capability. The characters used for the separators may be the period, comma, or other characters.

On each server, the setting of the parameter NLS_NUMERIC_CHARACTERS is used to specify both the decimal separator and the grouping separator. For example, NLS_NUMERIC_CHARACTERS = ".," means that "." is used as the decimal separator and "," is used as the grouping separator. Oracle Applications products generally store numbers as a data type of NUMBER, enabling numbers to be interpreted correctly with any radix format.

Another good reference note is 30778.1: Init.ora Parameter "NLS_NUMERIC_CHARACTERS" Reference Note

Also refer to notes: 408261.1, 275411.1, 364582.1 and 241047.1