Re: [bug-gawk] [bug report] gawk doesn’t work correctly when assign special value to variable

[Andrew J. Schorr]

Hi,

On Thu, Aug 06, 2015 at 03:55:50PM +0800, Li Chao wrote:
> The second line should not be there. Because "00e4" is NOT equal to "00e1"
> obviously.
> Is it a bug or by design?

This is a tricky area.  Please check the manual for the discussion
of "String Type versus Numeric Type":

http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/Variable-Typing.html

I think the command-line assignment results in a variable of type STRNUM.

> 3. Workaround:
> gawk -v var="00e1" '$2==""var' 1.txt
> gawk -v var="^00e1$" '$2~var' 1.txt

These examples may also be helpful:

bash-4.2$ gawk 'BEGIN {var = "00e1"} $2 == var' 1.txt
00e1 00e1
bash-4.2$ gawk 'BEGIN {var = 00e1} $2 == var' 1.txt
00e1 00e1
00e2 00e4

Regards,
Andy