printf "%c" and numbers above 255

[Hermann Peifer]

According to the printf documentation in the Gawk manual:

|%c  |This prints a number as an ASCII character; thus, `printf "%c", 
65' outputs the letter `A'.

My observations is that this works fine for numbers 0..127 and even for 
128..255 (although resulting characters of the latter range are perhaps 
not ASCII characters).

For numbers above 255, printf basically prints the character of 
number%256, e.g.:

$ awk 'BEGIN{printf "%c\n",65+256}'
A
$ awk 'BEGIN{printf "%c\n",65+256+256}'
A


I'm not quite sure if this is a bug or feature. For me it was at least 
somewhat surprising.

Hermann

PS
A nice enhancement would be if printf could print Unicode characters, 
similar to /usr/bin/printf, which has the formats \uHHHH and \UHHHHHHHH:

\uHHHH   Unicode (ISO/IEC 10646) character with hex value HHHH (4 digits)
\UHHHHHHHH  Unicode character with hex value HHHHHHHH (8 digits)