bug#35078: Possible bug in the date command, to do with %p

[Nicholas Joll]

Dear all

    The following relevant thing has been brought to my attention (by a
Conky developer):

     $  man strftime | grep Convert

            ^      Convert alphabetic characters in result string to
uppercase.

i.e., strftime, which is, I believe, a C function included in the C
'time' library, has an option (which one can use in Conky, actually) to
convert output to all uppercase - thus achieving what I desired. 'Date'
could implement something similar.

Yours

Nicholas

On 03/04/2019 04:08, Eric Blake wrote:
> On 4/2/19 3:22 PM, Nicholas Joll wrote:
>
>> I have two suggestions. (1) Amend the manual such that it says something
>> like the following.
>>
>>     %P     like %p, but lower case (or uppercase if uppercase is all
>> that the locale provides)
>>
>> (2) Add (and document) a new option that works thusly:
>>
>>     %PP     locale's implementation of AM/PM (or blank if the locale has
>> no such implementation), forced into uppercase
> We can't spell it %PP (that would be parsed as "%P" "P"), but we could
> take a leaf from %:z (and even %:::z) if we wanted to use : as a flag to
> force particular capitalizations.  Of course, even toupper()/tolower()
> are locale-dependent, so it's still hard to say what could really be
> forced if we added particular variants for overriding a locale's
> preferred case.
>