Re: ensure numeric comparison

[Andrew J. Schorr]

Hi,

On Fri, May 06, 2022 at 05:28:39PM -0500, Peng Yu wrote:
> I want to make sure whether the following code is guaranteed to
> compare $1 and $2 numerically as long as the input of the 1st and 2nd
> fields are legitimate numbers or empty strings (which are considered
> as 0).
> 
> awk -e '{ print ($1 < $2) }' < input
> 
> Or there is any corner case when even the 1st and 2nd fields are
> legitimate numbers or empty strings, they may be compared as strings.
> 
> Note although an empty string compared with an empty string is a
> string comparison, the result is the same as 0 and 0 comparison, so it
> is still effectively considered as a numerical comparison for the
> current discussion.

This discussion has gone off the rails. If you've got user input
of an empty string, then gawk will consider it to be a string, not
a number, and the comparision will be a string comparison. If you
want to ensure a numeric comparison, you must coerce both arguments
to be numbers. This is typically done by adding zero.

It's explained by this table in the docs:

   When two operands are compared, either string comparison or numeric
comparison may be used.  This depends upon the attributes of the
operands, according to the following symmetric matrix:

        +----------------------------------------------
        |       STRING          NUMERIC         STRNUM
--------+----------------------------------------------
        |
STRING  |       string          string          string
        |
NUMERIC |       string          numeric         numeric
        |
STRNUM  |       string          numeric         numeric
--------+----------------------------------------------

And by this bit of sample code showing that an empty string is considered
to be a string:

bash-4.2$ echo 1::b | gawk -F: '{print typeof($1), typeof($2), typeof($3)}'
strnum string string

The beauty of gawk is that it's very easy to test and get your answer:

bash-4.2$ echo :-1 | gawk -F: '{print ($1 < $2)}'
1
bash-4.2$ echo :-1 | gawk -F: '{print ($1+0 < $2+0)}'
0

Is everything now crystal clear?

Regards,
Andy