Re: Decimal point or decimal comma

[Aharon Robbins]

Greetings. Re this:

> From: "=?utf-8?Q?G=C3=B6ran?= Uddeborg" <address@hidden>
> Date: Sat, 8 Aug 2009 21:28:27 +0200
> To: address@hidden
> Subject: Decimal point or decimal comma
>
> I recently updated my gawk to
>
>     GNU Awk 3.1.6a

I don't know why you're using this or which version it is; this would be
some (old) snapshot of the CVS development tree. You should throw it away
and get the officially released version, which is 3.1.7, from ftp.gnu.org.

> and some of my scripts stopped working, getting divisions with zero
> and similar problems.  I tracked this down to gawk no longer taking
> locale into consideration when parsing numbers.  The numbers read by
> the script with decimal commas were no longer correctly parsed.
>
> I see in the NEWS file that you reverted this intentionally since you
> got complaints about the feature.  I, for one, did appreciate it.  But
> I guess you can't please everyone.

See the  --use-lc-numeric option which will give you what you want.

You will have to use a shell script to invoke gawk with this option, since
it can't be combined on a #! line.  If this is absolutely devastating,
contact me off list and I'll send you a patch to add a single letter
option for this.

Thanks,

Arnold