Re: [gawk] type conversion error ascii (hex) to integer

[Lee Howard]

Stepan Kasal wrote:

> Hello,
>
> On Tue, Aug 16, 2005 at 07:59:06AM -0700, Lee Howard wrote:
>  
>
> > > awk 'BEGIN { printf(strtonum("0xff")) "\n" };'
> > >      
> ...
>  
>
> > Unfortunately, neither --non-decimal-data nor strtonum are portable.
> >    
>
> Sure, there is no portable solution.  It was shere good luck if your
> solution worked on more platforms.  POSIX prohibits hexadecimal numbers
> even in program code.
>  

It was a somewhat recent development and had only been tested thoroughly 
with mawk 1.3.3 and gawk 3.0.6.  The problem was noticed with gawk 
3.1.3.  I suspect that it would have been a problem on other awk 
implementations, yes.  So I've been looking for a portable solution, and 
I didn't mean to indicate that the original implementation was portable 
(because it obviously wasn't).

> But strtonum can be implemented as a user function; actually, it comes
> as an example with gawk.  It's installed as /usr/share/awk/strtonum.awk
> on my GNU/Linux system.
>  

I ended up writing a user function that converted ascii 
(hex-representation) to a number, and that works fine for me.  I thought 
that I had encountered a bug, so I reported it here out of diligence.  I 
see now that it was a feature and not a bug, so I apologize for the error.

Thanks,

Lee.