gawk: Locale-dependant bug with string to floating point conversion

[Jim Meyering]

Package: gawk
Version: 1:3.1.3-3
Severity: normal
Tags: patch

This bug was originally reported by Michael Mauch here:

  http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-utils/2004-04/msg00060.html

It also affects string-to-floating-point conversions.
This works fine in the C locale:

  $ LC_ALL=c gawk 'BEGIN {print 0+".1"}'
  0.1

But not in some other locales (assuming you have them installed):

  $ LC_ALL=af_ZA      gawk 'BEGIN {print 0+".1", 0+",1"}'
  0 0
  $ address@hidden gawk 'BEGIN {print 0+".1", 0+",1"}'
  0 0

With the fix below, it works:

  $ LC_ALL=af_ZA ./gawk 'BEGIN {print 0+".1", 0+",1"}'
  0 0,1

First, gawk is mistakenly using a replacement strtod function,
when the libc one would work just fine.
Then, the replacement function hard-codes `.' as the decimal point.

When running configure, I see this:

  checking for strtod with C89 semantics... no

Gawk's configure-time test for a working strtod seems to be reversed.
Here's a patch to make gawk use libc's strtod when possible.

Eventually, gawk's replacement strtod should be fixed to honor the
locale-specified decimal point.

2004-04-29  Jim Meyering  <address@hidden>

        * strtod.m4 (GAWK_FUNC_STRTOD_C89): Fix reversed test.

--- strtod.m4.~1~       2004-04-29 08:57:29.232172928 +0200
+++ strtod.m4   2004-04-29 08:57:50.402123674 +0200
@@ -45,7 +45,7 @@ main ()
   char *str = "0x345a";
 
   d = strtod(str, 0);
-  if (d == 0)
+  if (d == 13402)
      exit (0);
   else
      exit (1);


-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.5
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C

Versions of packages gawk depends on:
ii  libc6                       2.3.2.ds1-12 GNU C Library: Shared libraries an

-- no debconf information