Re: [bug-gawk] Wrong output in documentation example

[Aharon Robbins]

Hi. Apologies for the long delay in replying.

First, thanks for this report.

Second, thanks to address@hidden who also reported this (more recently).

> Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2012 14:31:52 +0200
> To: address@hidden
> From: Jeroen Schot <address@hidden>
> Subject: [bug-gawk] Wrong output in documentation example
>
> Hello,
>
> An Ubuntu user reported [1] a discrepancy between an example in the
> manual and the actual command in section 4.1 [2].
>
> [1]: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gawk-doc/+bug/287948
> [2]: http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/Records.html#Records
>
> From the manual:
> | Using an unusual character such as ???/??? for the record separator
> | produces correct behavior in the vast majority of cases. However,
> | the following (extreme) pipeline prints a surprising ???1???:
> |
> |  $ echo | awk 'BEGIN { RS = "a" } ; { print NF }'
> |  -| 1
> |
> | There is one field, consisting of a newline. The value of the
> | built-in variable NF is the number of fields in the current record.
>
> But using gawk 3.1.6, 3.1.7, 3.1.8 or 4.0.1 the example prints '0'.
> Mawk and BWK's awk also print '0'.
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Jeroen Schot

This was a bit of a puzzler to figure out. :-)

I have just pushed a change to the gawk-4.0-stable branch.  The doc
now indicates that gawk prints a 1 only in POSIX mode, since in that
case, newline is not whitespace.

Thanks again,

Arnold