Re: Octal conversion with stringtoint

Dave,

Thanks for your attention to this. I think that you made the right
choice, fixing the documentation and leaving the functions alone.

This probably saved me from some debugging and hidden errors. My
use of the stringtoint family was certainly widespread through many
NCL programs. I do not recall ever adding code to guard against
misinterpretation due to leading zeros.

--Dave A.

David Brown wrote:
> Hi Dave,
>
> Due to the inconvenience of the requirement to remove leading zeros when
> an octal interpretation was not desired, octal conversion was removed from
> the stringto<inttype> functions as of version 4.2.0.a033 (released
> January 23, 2006). Apparently the documentation was not updated to
> reflect this fact.
> In fact, from reviewing the change logs, it seems that octal conversion
> was never in a release version of NCL. It was part of the development
> version
> only from February to December 2005.
>
> It appears that the documentation that claims this capability has always
> been in error.
> We will correct this oversight as soon as possible.
> -dave
>
>
> On Jul 17, 2008, at 8:20 PM, Dave Allured wrote:
>
>> NCL support,
>>
>> There is a problem with the "stringtoint" family of type converters.
>> The documentation says that a string of digits with a leading zero
>> will be interpreted in octal. However, I seem to be getting decimal
>> conversion rather than octal on my system, Mac OS 10.5 on PPC, NCL
>> versions 4.2 through 5.0.1 (pre-release).
>>
>> These functions all act the same way:
>>
>> stringtoint
>> stringtointeger
>> stringtoshort
>> stringtolong
>>
>> Please see the attached demo program, which incorporates parts of
>> Example 3 on each function's documentation page. For octal conversion
>> I am getting the integers 5, 100, 222 instead of the expected values
>> 5, 64, 146.
>>
>> I wonder whether this is widespread on other platforms, and how much
>> existing user code is silently depending on the actual behavior with
>> decimal data that includes leading zeros. Thanks for your consideration.
>>
>> Dave Allured
>> CU/CIRES Climate Diagnostics Center (CDC)
>> http://cires.colorado.edu/science/centers/cdc/
>> NOAA/ESRL/PSD, Climate Analysis Branch (CAB)
>> http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/
>> ;---------------------------------------------------------------------
>> ;
>> ; Test for string conversion functions with octal representation.
>> ;
>> ; Downloaded 2008-jul-17
>> ; From NCL website:
>> ; http://www.ncl.ucar.edu/Document/Functions/Built-in/stringtoint.shtml
>> ;
>> ; Modifications:
>> ;
>> ; 1. Tests for other stringto... functions were added.
>> ; 2. Output format was modified for clarity.
>> ;
>> ;----------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> ; Example 3
>> ; Shows how octal and hexadecimal string representations are handled.
>>
>> begin
>>
>> ; Specify an array of strings representing octal numbers
>>
>> a = (/"05", "0100", "0222"/)
>>
>> print ("")
>> print ("Octal conversion, stringtoint, expected = (/ 5, 64, 146 /)")
>>
>> b = stringtoint(a)
>> print(b+"")
>>
>> ;-----------------------------
>>
>> ; Specify an array of strings representing hexadecimal numbers
>>
>> c = (/"0x5", "0x10", "0x9A"/)
>>
>> print ("")
>> print ("Hexadecimal conversion, stringtoint, expected = (/ 5, 16,
>> 154 /)")
>>
>> d = stringtoint(c)
>> print(d+"")
>>
>> ;-----------------------------
>>
>> print ("")
>> print ("Octal conversion, stringtointeger, expected = (/ 5, 64, 146
>> /)")
>>
>> b2 = stringtointeger(a)
>> print(b2+"")
>>
>> ;-----------------------------
>>
>> print ("")
>> print ("Octal conversion, stringtoshort, expected = (/ 5, 64, 146 /)")
>>
>> b3 = stringtoshort(a)
>> print(b3+"")
>>
>> ;-----------------------------
>>
>> print ("")
>> print ("Octal conversion, stringtolong, expected = (/ 5, 64, 146 /)")
>>
>> b4 = stringtolong(a)
>> print(b4+"")
>> end
>> _______________________________________________
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>

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Received on Tue Jul 22 2008 - 16:53:07 MDT