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;
  }

[download]

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;
  }

[download]

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.

Hugo

In reply to Re: Weird number formatting by hv
in thread Weird number formatting by licking9Volts

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