Re: problems with decimal number display by PSPP

[hector morada]

Guys,

Given my age (71 years) and academic and work background, I won't be able to keep pace with you.

I had one of my sons install PSPP 1.4.1 in his notebook that run under Windows 10. We  ran the same set of data I furnished John earlier. To my pleasant surprise, the ghost special character did not appear!

I uninstalled the PSPP in my notebook, an old DELL running under Windows 7.

I installed an older PSPP version as indicated below:

pspp-20181109-setup
GNU pspp 1.2.0-g0fb4db

which I downloaded from https://www.tonyknowles.com/pspp-statistics/

I tested it with same set of data. The ghost special character is nowhere to be found.

I am very proud to have met the two of you. Your kind of guys form part of my "classroom" examples of unselfish professionals who share their knowledge and skill to others.

I will not speculate on the current problem.  Some of my students are submitting PSPP outputs with that special character attached to numbers with ABS(value) < than 1.

Thank you very much and I am praying that the said "bug" could be found and eventually be exorcised out of the PSPP system!

On Saturday, April 17, 2021, 2:55:23 PM GMT+8, John Darrington <john@darrington.wattle.id.au> wrote:

Thanks Ben,

Looking at this, I'm inclined to think you're right.

We're still however speculating about the cause.  For most users this
problem does not manifest itself, so I guess there is some particular
combination of platform, operating system, (locale?), cairo version,
which gives rise to it.  So I think the onus is on the people who are
actually experiencing the issue to demonstrate a reproducible set of
conditions under which it occurs.

When we can reproduce the problem, we have a chance of finding the cause
and fixing it.

J'

On Fri, Apr 16, 2021 at 10:58:07AM -0700, Ben Pfaff wrote:
    I think it's more likely to be the following code in cairo-fsm.c that
    tries to avoid wordwrapping.
    I don't know why U+2060 WORD JOINER is showing up as U+0000 on Windows.
    I guess we could add #ifndef __WIN32__ and see if it goes away.
   
        if (decimal[0]
              && c_isdigit (decimal[1])
              && (decimal == text || !c_isdigit (decimal[-1])))
            {
              struct string tmp = DS_EMPTY_INITIALIZER;
              ds_extend (&tmp, ds_length (&body) + 16);
              markup_escape (&tmp, markup, text, decimal - text + 1);
              ds_put_unichar (&tmp, 0x2060 /* U+2060 WORD JOINER */);
              markup_escape (&tmp, markup, decimal + 1, -1);
              ds_swap (&tmp, &body);
              ds_destroy (&tmp);
            }
   
    On Fri, Apr 16, 2021 at 8:26 AM John Darrington
    <john@darrington.wattle.id.au> wrote:
    >
    > After a fair bit of effort, I have been unable to reproduce this problem.
    >
    > So if this issue is to have any chance of getting fixed someone who is
    > experiencing it is going to  need to give us a backtrace.
    >
    > Looking through the code, I consider the most likely function of interest
    > is  output_decimal in src/data/data-out.c - in particular this bit of code
    > seems most relevant:
    >
    >      if (decimals > 0)
    >        {
    >          *p++ = style->decimal;
    >          p = mempcpy (p, &magnitude[integer_digits + 1], decimals);
    >        }
    >
    > However I can't see anything actually wrong here.  I suggest that you
    > put a breakpoint here conditional upon *p == 0 ... hopefully that might
    > provide something of interest.
    >
    > J'