Informix Error -1202: An attempt was made to divide by zero.

Reasons / Common Causes

-1202 fires when a division's divisor evaluates to zero — per the official guidance, zero can't be a divisor; in some cases this arises because the divisor is a character value that doesn't convert properly to numeric (implicitly becoming zero).

1. A genuine zero-value divisor, per the official guidance — the direct, common cause, often from unvalidated user input or a computed value that happened to be zero.
2. A character divisor that doesn't convert cleanly to numeric, per the official guidance's specifically named case — an implicit conversion silently producing zero rather than raising a separate conversion error.

Solutions / Resolution

1. Check the divisor for zero before dividing, guarding the division in application logic.
2. If the divisor comes from a character value, verify it actually converts to a valid, nonzero number, per the official guidance's named failure mode, rather than assuming the implicit conversion succeeded.

Examples

Guarding against a zero divisor

SELECT CASE WHEN denom = 0 THEN NULL ELSE numer / denom END
  FROM calculations;

Diagnostic Checks

1. Identify the specific divisor value (and its source) at the point of failure, checking whether it's a genuine zero or a character value that failed to convert as expected.

Related Errors / Related Topics

No closely related error codes are cross-referenced for -1202 in this set yet.

A zero (or zero-converting) divisor — guard the division, and verify character divisors convert to valid nonzero numbers.