Re: Feature request: c-snprintf

[Bruno Haible]

Eric Blake wrote:
> Huh?  ... John is asking for converting numbers to strings

Yes. Ooooops, what I wrote was complete nonsense.

So, for numbers to strings, there are four ways to proceed:

  1) Use the snprintf_l function available on MacOS X 10.5.
     Drawback: Unportable, and gnulib cannot provide an easy replacement for
     locale_t on other systems.

  2) Switch the locale to "C" temporarily for the duration of the conversion.
     Like done in gnulib/lib/c-strtod.c.
     Drawbacks: Will be slow on many systems. Not multi-thread safe.

  3) Split the format string into individual format directives, and for those
     that convert numbers, call the snprintf function for the current locale,
     change decimal_point_char() occurrences to '.', and remove grouping
     characters.
     Drawback: Some code to write yourself.

  4) Use code extracted from gnulib/lib/vasnprintf.c, modified to use '.'
     instead of decimal_point_char().
     Drawback: Code duplicatiion.

Opinions?

Bruno