Re: printf issue with thousands separator

[Dr . Jürgen Sauermann]

    Hi Martin,
      
      actually ⎕FIO emulates printf() rather than calling it. There were
      a number of
      nasty effects caused by locales when using printf() and friends
      and therefore I
      decided to implement it explicitly. For that reason not all format
      flags are supported.
      
      I will look into adding support for the thousands separator (but
      not supporting the
      locales nonsense). That is, the thousands separator will always be
      comma and not
      e.g. full-stop like in some countries and comma in others.
      
      BTW format by example should have done the job (see the APL2
      language
      reference page 140):
      
      
            "5,555.50" ⍕ 1234.56
        1,234.56
      
      
       Best Regards,
      Jürgen

On 7/4/22 12:56 PM, Martin Michel wrote:

> Hi there,
>
> I want to print a table which also includes some financal figures. Here
> I need to group with a thousands separator. My first attempts using the
> "Format by example" method failed due to limitations of it. That's why I
> fell back to the ⎕FIO system interface, trying the same with `printf`.
>
> However, now I see that using it from the APL interpreter leads to
> different results than eg. coreutils printf. I was thinking it uses the
> same C library function under the hood (GNU glibc?).
>
> So here is the example, first what I got from coreutils (and what I want
> to get):
>
>     printf "$ %+'.0f    $ %+'.0f\n" 1234523.435 -9587294.01
> $ +1,234,523    $ -9,587,294
>
> And here is APL's output, ignoring the thousands:
>     "$ %+'.0f    $ %+'.0f\n" 1234523.435 ¯9587294.01 ⎕FIO[22] 1
> $ +1234523    $ -9587294
>
> Is there a way to "activate" the thousands separator (%') in APL?
> Alternatively, is it possible after all to achieve my desired output
> with APL "format by example" or other means (I may have missed something
> but having two decorators with negative numbers and without decimal
> points seems impossible).
>
> Any help is welcome, thanks for it in advance!
>
> Kind regards,
> Martin
>
>