[bug-recutils] Locale issues [was: Comparison operator on reals fails]

[John Darrington]

On Thu, Aug 09, 2012 at 03:36:48PM +0000, John Darrington wrote:
     Name: Adrian Mole
     Age: 13.75
     
     Name: Fred Blogs
     Age: 9.0
     
     and run this query on it:
     
     recsel -e "Age < 18.0" -P Name acquaintances.rec
     
     Why aren't Adrian Mole and Fred Blogs also selected?
     

Ahh! I know why! I had my locale set to de_DE were . is not the
decimal separator.  It works when I set LC_ALL=C

However this raises a number of questions?

* Why didn't recfix at least warn me that the fields declared as real
  were not valid in the current locale?

* There should be something about this in the user manual.

* How does locale affect other things.  For example: 
         - does LC_COLLATE change the sort order?
         - the  documentation says that "A field name is a sequence of 
alphanumeric characters"
         does that mean it consults the LC_CTYPE catagory to decide what it 
"alphanumeric"?  If 
         so, this could mean that something which is a valid field name in one 
locale is invalid
         in another.
     


* Is it even desirable that the locale (except for the LC_MESSAGES category) 
  should be used in recutils at all?


J'

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