At this point, I am not sure how to proceed except to rethink that toFloat() function and many other places where we use exceptions. We get such dirty data that I need a "safe" way to convert a string to float without throwing an exception. BTW, I tried other combinations in case there may have been some weird interactions with the ::REAL conversion operator, but nothing made any change. Could you recommend another approach off the top of your head? I could use regexes for testing etc... Or maybe there is another option like a no-throw conversion that's built in or in some extension that you may know of? Like the "SAFE." Prefix in BigQuery.
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION safe_to_double_precision(t text) RETURNS double precision AS $$ BEGIN IF $1 SIMILAR TO '[+-]?([0-9]*[.])?[0-9]+' THEN RETURN $1::double precision; ELSE RETURN NULL; END IF; END; $$ LANGUAGE plpgsql IMMUTABLE STRICT;
