From: Brooks Davis <brooks@...>
Date: 2005-01-27T08:34:27+09:00
Subject: printf with octal numbers

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The behavior of sprintf("%d", str) is not what I would expect.  If str
begins with a '0', for example "01", it is treated as an octal number.
This seem odd because I would expect the following two lines to be the
same:

sprintf("%d", str)
sprintf("%d", str.to_i)

This is not the case:

irb(main):006:0> str=3D"08"
=3D> "08"
irb(main):007:0> sprintf("%d", str)
ArgumentError: invalid value for Integer: "08"
        from (irb):7:in `sprintf'
        from (irb):7
irb(main):008:0> sprintf("%d", str.to_i)
=3D> "8"
irb(main):009:0> str=3D"010"
=3D> "010"
irb(main):010:0> sprintf("%d", str)
=3D> "8"
irb(main):011:0> sprintf("%d", str.to_i)
=3D> "10"

The seems to violate POLA.  In my case it was quite astonishing because
I had a script where I parse strings like "r01rpc2" to find the rack and
power controller number from a string.  When I added my eighth rack, the
script stopped working after several years of operation.  Is this
behavior intended?  The documentation on rubycentral doesn't really say
one way or another.

In case it matters, my ruby version is:

[12:15pm] brooks@minya (~/working/cluster/power): ruby -v
ruby 1.8.2 (2004-07-29) [i386-freebsd6]

Thanks,
Brooks

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