Re: [gawk] Handling variants of CSV input data formats

On 8/26/2024 8:39 PM, Janis Papanagnou wrote:

>
I've missed that there was an explicit
$ export POSIXLY_CORRECT=1
set on the very top of these examples. Gee!

 
POSIXLY_CORRECT=1 (or equivalently `--posix` aka `-P`) affects numbers
in the input your script reads (as shown in the previous post) and
strings being converted to numbers in your code, it doesn't affect
literal numbers in the source code for your script that awk reads.
 
In the source code the decimal separator for a literal number (as
opposed to a string being converted to a number) is always `.`.
 
You can't use, say, a comma as the decimal separator in a literal number
because a comma already means something in the awk syntax, e.g. `print
4,321` means the same as "print 4 OFS 321`.
 
[examples and explanations]