[cx-oracle-users] Types used for values returned from a query

[Paul M. <p.f...@gm...>]

I have an application which needs to be able to execute a (relatively)
arbitrary query and dump the output to stdout, in such a way that
another (non-Python) program can pick up the values and rebuild them
exactly.

I don't need to support exotic types like LOBs, but I *do* need to
handle basic numbers, dates, and strings.

To do this, I need to understand *exactly* what types are returned by
cursor.fetchone().

Strings and dates are OK - strings are obviously trivial, and
dates/timestamps come back as Python datetime values, so I can convert
to something transportable like "microseconds since the epoch,
converted to a string".

But I seem to be having problems with numbers. At the moment, I'm just
doing str() on the returned value, and getting  odd results. I suspect
this is because I'm sometimes getting floats or longs and just doing
str() on these is (a) giving me variable formats, and (b) losing
precision in the case of floats.

Is there a way of getting a precise value back for a numeric field, or
is the data lost? Can I do things with NumberVar types, and get the
full precision data from that?

Alternatively, is there any likelihood of cxOracle using Python 2.4's
Decimal type in the near future?

Thanks,
Paul.