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NANVL

Syntax

Description of the illustration nanvl.gif

Purpose

The NANVL function is useful only for floating-point numbers of type BINARY_FLOAT or BINARY_DOUBLE. It instructs Oracle Database to return an alternative value n1 if the input value n2 is NaN (not a number). If n2 is not NaN, then Oracle returns n2.

This function takes as arguments any numeric datatype or any nonnumeric datatype that can be implicitly converted to a numeric datatype. Oracle determines the argument with the highest numeric precedence, implicitly converts the remaining arguments to that datatype, and returns that datatype.

See Also:

Table 2-10, "Implicit Type Conversion Matrix" for more information on implicit conversion, "Floating-Point Numbers" for information on binary-float comparison semantics, and "Numeric Precedence" for information on numeric precedence

Examples

Using table float_point_demo created for TO_BINARY_DOUBLE, insert a second entry into the table:

Insert INTO float_point_demo
  VALUES (0,'NaN','NaN');

SELECT * FROM float_point_demo;

   DEC_NUM BIN_DOUBLE  BIN_FLOAT
---------- ---------- ----------
   1234.56 1.235E+003 1.235E+003
         0        Nan        Nan

The following example returns bin_float if it is a number. Otherwise, 0 is returned.

SELECT bin_float, NANVL(bin_float,0)
  FROM float_point_demo;

 BIN_FLOAT NANVL(BIN_FLOAT,0)
---------- ------------------
1.235E+003         1.235E+003
       Nan                  0