Re: might be a bug in gawk

[Andreas Schwab]

Dave B <address@hidden> writes:

> Andrew J. Schorr wrote:
>> On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 11:58:29PM -0400, joanes.polus wrote:
>>>    execution of:
>>>
>>>    echo "a%28b%29%c"|awk -F "a" '{printf $2}'
>>>
>>>    give this result:
>>>
>>>    %28b%c
>>>
>>>    and not
>>>
>>>    %28b%29%c
>>>
>>>    So may be a bug or i do not understand something in awk.
>> 
>> Try using "print" instead of "printf" and you should get
>> the desired result.
>
> Agreed. However, I'd still expect to get a "not enough arguments to printf"
> kind of error, which is not produced (whereas mawk and Bell labs awk do
> complain if asked to run the OP's code).

There is no formatting directive that reqires an argument.  %28b is
unknown and %29% is treated the same as %%.  Perhaps mawk assigns a
meaning to %b.

Andreas.

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Andreas Schwab, address@hidden
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