Re: What is the opposite of 'printf'?

[Matthew Woehlke]

Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
> Paul Eggert wrote:
> > Matthew Woehlke writes:
> > > Given the remainder of this thread, can one of the maintainers offer
> > > an opinion on whether or not 'unprintf' (also useful for programmers;
> > > again, see rest of the thread) would be a useful addition to
> > > coreutils, or perhaps some other existing GNU project?
> >
> > I dunno, it sounds fairly specialized.  Why not just use a portable
> > POSIX script instead?

Hmm... yes, probably (thanks for a reply, at least!), but it isn't quite 
as simple as writing a script. Yes, you can do it that way, but it isn't 
as simple/efficient as it seems at first glance. What I eventually wrote 
is intended to work 'well' with things that are mostly-but-not-entirely 
ASCII, i.e. it translates 'a' to 'a', and so forth, while translating 
non-printing characters into escapes while trying to emit the shortest 
possible sequences. You do realize that you can't translate '\0\x30' (a 
NUL followed by a printing zero digit) into '\00', right? ;-) 'Shortest 
sequence' requires looking ahead.

> I should note that I'm still waiting for the someone to step up as
> miscutils maintainer, address@hidden never got back to me about it.

Hmm... don't think I have time for package maintainership (plus I am 
terrible with autotools :-)). Too bad. Does anyone else have time? 
Pleeeease?

Seriously, depending on how complicated it is, I might be able to help 
out, I'm just not willing to commit to being the primary/only 
maintainer. :-)

--
Matthew
What? This signature /again/?