From bug-request at octave dot org Wed Dec  7 18:03:56 2005
Subject: Re: str2num.m can't handle LF character.
From: Paul Kienzle <pkienzle at users dot sourceforge dot net>
To: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
Cc: bug at octave dot org, Bill Denney <denney@seas.upenn.edu>,         "Frederick (Rick) A Niles" <fniles@mitre.org>
Date: Wed, 7 Dec 2005 19:02:39 -0500


On Dec 7, 2005, at 3:38 PM, John W. Eaton wrote:

> On  7-Dec-2005, Bill Denney wrote:
>
> | I don't think that this is actually an error.  str2num should just 
> convert
> | strings to numbers.  If you give it a string that is not strictly 
> numeric
> | (including all numeric notation such as 1e5-3j), it is supposed to 
> return
> | empty.
> |
> | The problem sounds like it is with how your file is being read.
>
> I agree that it would be best if everyone would translate text files
> appropriately.  Then Octave would only have to handle '\n' as the
> newline character.  Things would be simpler.  But we would also see a
> lot of messages from people who don't know (or care) about EOL
> translation, and would just complain that Octave sucks because it
> can't read their simple files.  There are already a number of checks
> for \r\n and \r as EOL characters.  I think the following patch will
> help.  I don't see how it could hurt very much, but maybe I'm missing
> something.

Is lex greedy?

   if 3 == 1 ...
+ 2
     'true'
   else
     'false'
   endif

will print different things if fed '\r\n' as two NL tokens
rather than one.

- Paul



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