Maybe I'm missing something, but shouldn't it be "0.225150000000000E+06"? ("E" instead of "D")? Or is that some locale settings?

Also, just a side note, do you really want 9999 entries in @info, or do you just want to split however many there are? If so, just omit the 3rd paramater to split.

-- zigdon

The 'D' means that the values are doubles instead of floats (in FORTRAN).

Updates:

This sounds like a bug that should be reported to p5p. This is such an old and standard notation that it will probably be common for C's strtod() to support it so Perl should be made aware of it in order to avoid the misleading warning.

split didn't used to support -1 as the third argument so old code had to make up some "arbitrarilly large number" to get such functionality. In this case, I would think just dropping the third argument makes the most sense (since trailing spaces should probably not create a final, empty "number" to be processed). But in other cases you should change the "9999" to "-1" so that your code won't break when you actually get 10000 items. I complained about this in Perl 4 and suggested the current behavior but Larry didn't seem impressed so I was glad when this feature showed up. (:

                - tye

I thought the same thing about the E instead of D, but the files are USGS Digital Elevation Models taken from the Texas National Resources Information website. DEM is some kind of standard format for these models. Thanks for the tip on splitting also. I've fixed it.

See, you need one of us old-timers for this kind of stuff. ;-)

In all likelihood, a Fortran program is producing that data. The variable in the program is declared DOUBLE PRECISION, and probably a D or G format is being used to print it. Just substitute E for D and you should be fine.

Surely, surely, those 'D's have to mean 'E's... well, of course they don't have to, but if you have to add 30 to one of those numbers, then you have to know what the original number is, right?

So that's a piece of data you need someone to inform you of. If it is an exponent indicator, then can you just do a pattern match before interpreting the number (s/D/E/)?

Rob

The 'D' causes the problem, perl does not understand these numbers as numbers. Does that 'D' have any other meaning than the 'E',which means '*10^' and _is_ understood by perl?

I don't understand that notation either, so i cannot tell you exactly what you can do, anyways it must include removing that letter from the string.

If I correctly understand what is happening here, the letter 'D' is a locale-specific exponentiation letter: what locale are you using? Since the output shows that perl is parsing the number correctly, I'd guess that the "Argument isn't numeric" warning is a bug in perl - that it is checking only for "E" as the exponentiation letter - but that the operating system library is then correctly converting the number.

If that is correct, the best workaround I can think of is to locally disable the warning, and check the correctness yourself:

  sub weird2number {
    my $text = shift;
    unless ($text =~ /^\d*\.\d+D[+\-]\d+$/) {
      warn qq{Argument "$text" is not weird};
    }
    no warnings "numeric";
    return $text + 0;
  }
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If you also need to output numbers in this format, you may also have problems: the closest is the (s)printf '%E' format, which puts the first significant digit before the decimal point. The simplest way I can think of to get around that is to use sprintf '%E', $number and then modify the result, perhaps like so:

  sub number2weird {
    my $number = shift;
    my $text = sprintf '%.14E', $number;
    $text =~ s{
      (\d) \. (\d+ [DE]) ([+\-] \d+)
    }{ "0.$1$2" . sprintf "%+03d", $3 + 1 }xe
      or warn qq{Failed to make "$text" weird};
    return $text;
  }
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Note however that the output format of sprintf '%E' is also dependent on your operating system libraries, so you may need to modify the pattern to match correctly.

This may or may not help, but try putting a 'use integer;' at the top of your program. That should force Perl to do handle numbers as integers instead of floats.

----
Reinvent a rounder wheel.

Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated

Thanks hardburn, I tried it, but it ignored the decimals. Maybe because of the notation?

$inrecord =~ s/D/E/g;
@info = split(' ', $inrecord);

$my_x = $info[4] + 0;
$my_y = $info[5] + 0;
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