Re: Command line variable assignment problems with localized floats

[Aharon Robbins]

Greetings. I took another look at your original mail.
I am on a Fedora Core 2 system, using an unpatched gawk 3.1.5.

> Date: Fri, 22 Dec 2006 19:19:31 +0100
> From: "Heike C. Zimmerer" <address@hidden>
> Subject: Command line variable assignment problems with localized floats
> To: address@hidden
>
> Hello,
>
> I'm reporting a localization issue, checked with:
>
>  $ gawk --version
>  GNU Awk 3.1.5
>  Copyright (C) 1989, 1991-2005 Free Software Foundation.
>
> Problem 1:
>  Command line non-option variable assignments of floats are incorrecty
>  handled if the current locale (LC_NUMERIC) defines something else than
>  a dot (".") to represent a decimal point.  (Non-option assigment means:
>  awk '...{...}' var=val (as opposed to awk -v var=val '...{...}')..)
>
>  The fractional part is truncated for both "." and ",".
>
> Problem 2:
>
>  This is with the -v var=val form of command line assignments: Using
>  this form with a different character for the decimal point yields
>  about the opposite result: both characters are recognized as decimal
>  point sign.
>
>
> To reproduce the problem:
>
> Locale environment:
>  $ locale -a
>  [..]
>  de_DE.utf8
>  en_US.utf8
>  [..]
>
> Unless otherwise noted in the following examples, the en_US.utf8
> environment is used (it's my system wide default ($LANG)).
>
> given the following awk script (assigned to a shell variable):
>
> awktest='{
>   printf "a: \"%s\"->%f, b: \"%s\"->%f\n", a, a, b, b
> }'
>
> the following results are obtained:
>
>  $ echo | awk "$awktest" a=1.23 b=4,56
>  a: "1.23"->1.230000, b: "4,56"->4.000000
>
> ok.

$ echo | awk "$awktest" a=1.23 b=4,56
a: "1.23"->1.230000, b: "4,56"->4.000000

So far so good, everything is fine.

>  $ echo | LC_NUMERIC=de_DE.utf8 awk "$awktest" a=1.23 b=4,56
>  a: "1.23"->1,000000, b: "4,56"->4,000000

$ echo | LC_NUMERIC=de_DE.utf8 awk "$awktest" a=1.23 b=4,56
a: "1.23"->1.230000, b: "4,56"->4.000000

Here is where things diverge; I get the correct answer for a,
as well as the expected answer for b.

> Neither "." (correct) nor the now current deciaml point (",") are
> recognized.  (Btw, changing the last printf argument from `b´ into 
> `b ""´ (concatenation with the empty string) yields the correct result,
> which seems to indicate to me that the error happens very early during the
> interpretation of the command line argument).
>
> Now to problem #2 (which is less likely to cause real problems):
>
>  $ echo | awk -v a=1.23 -v b=1,23 "$awktest"
>  a: "1.23"->1.230000, b: "1,23"->1.000000
>
> Looks correct.

$ echo | awk -v a=1.23 -v b=1,23 "$awktest"
a: "1.23"->1.230000, b: "1,23"->1.000000

Here too. So far so good.

>  $ echo | LC_NUMERIC=de_DE.utf8 awk -v a=1.23 -v b=1,23 "$awktest"
>  a: "1.23"->1,230000, b: "1,23"->1,230000
>
> I'd expect 1,0000 for a's numeric value.

$ echo | LC_NUMERIC=de_DE.utf8 awk -v a=1.23 -v b=1,23 "$awktest"
a: "1.23"->1.230000, b: "1,23"->1.000000

Here too, I get the correct, expected results.

So, I don't know what to tell you. What system are you using?
Did you compile gawk from source?
Also, can you try the version from the public CVS at Savannah?

Thanks,

Arnold