Q: Why do programmers always get Christmas and Halloween mixed up?

[William Park]

----- Original Message ----
> From: Lennart Sorensen <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org>
> To: tlug-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org
> Sent: Wed, November 3, 2010 10:55:41 AM
> Subject: Re: [TLUG]: Q: Why do programmers always get Christmas and Halloween 
>mixed up?
> 
> On Tue, Nov 02, 2010 at 08:36:20PM -0400, Walter Dnes wrote:
> >   I  have one or 2 personal bash scripts that I have to go out of my way
> > to  *PREVENT* octal.  They parse/manipulate/calculate numbers that get
> >  pulled in from a fixed format text file.  And leading zeros royally
> >  screw things up, because they switch the numbers from base 10 to base 8.
> >  Here's a function I use a lot...
> > 
> > # bash treats leading zeros as  indicating octal, freaks out on
> > # on 08 or 09, and numbers 010 and above  are just plain wrong.
> > # So strip leading zeros.
> >  strip_leading_0() {
> >   stripped="$1"
> > #
> > # Leave plain  "0" alone.  Only strip zeros if string is longer
> > # than one  character.
> >   while [[ ${#stripped} -gt 1 ]] && [[  "${stripped:0:1}" == "0" ]]
> >   do
> >      stripped=${stripped:1}
> >   done
> >   export  stripped
> > }
> > 
> >   It gets called like so...
> > 
> > xday=${dataline:6:2}
> > strip_leading_0 "${xday}"
> >  xday=${stripped}
> 
> Would it be simpler to just prepend 10# to the  number?
> 
> For example:
> 
> y="0001234"
> let "x = 10#$y"
> echo  $x

Or, if you have recent Bash or Ksh,

     shopt -s extglob
     echo ${x##+(0)}
-- 
William



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