retitle 100808 gsub doesn't respect ^ when the pattern matches the empty string thanks
This bug has nothing to do with $0. BTW, the awk standard http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/awk.html does require updating $0: see paragraph 3 of the Description. And mawk does do that. echo -e "barfoo\nbo bo fo\n1 2 3" | mawk '{$1="foo"; print $0}' foo foo bo fo foo 2 3 The problem is with gsub, so the merge with 172774 is correct. Nobody bothered to post anything about that on this bug page, though! This mawk bug boils down to mawk not respecting ^ when the pattern matches the empty string. (I haven't dug into mawk's regex code, or tried other permutations, so while this new title is correct, it might not be where the bug is really coming from.) mawk 'BEGIN{s=" foo bar";gsub(/^ */, "_", s);print s;}'</dev/null _f_o_o_b_a_r_ gawk 'BEGIN{s=" foo bar";gsub(/^ */, "_", s);print s;}'</dev/null _foo bar There is a workaround: don't match the empty string when you don't need to. mawk 'BEGIN{s=" foo bar";gsub(/^ +/, "_", s);print s;}'</dev/null _foo bar This doesn't help if you wanted to use gsub to prepend something by replacing the empty string at the start, though. mawk 'BEGIN{s=" foo bar";gsub(/^/, "_", s);print s;}'</dev/null _ _f_o_o_ _b_a_r_ gawk 'BEGIN{s=" foo bar";gsub(/^/, "_", s);print s;}'</dev/null _ foo bar -- #define X(x,y) x##y Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X([EMAIL PROTECTED] , des.ca) "The gods confound the man who first found out how to distinguish the hours! Confound him, too, who in this place set up a sundial, to cut and hack my day so wretchedly into small pieces!" -- Plautus, 200 BC -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
