Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cica!iuvax!purdue!bu-cs!dartvax!eleazar.dartmouth.edu!earleh
From: earleh@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Earle R. Horton)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Script Manager compatible atof()?
Message-ID: <14940@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU>
Date: 9 Aug 89 23:04:59 GMT
References: <14919@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> <7304@microsoft.UUCP>
Reply-To: earleh@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Earle R. Horton)
Organization: Thayer School of Engineering
Lines: 33

In article <7304@microsoft.UUCP> ericsc@microsoft.UUCP (Eric Schlegel) writes:
>In article <14919@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> earleh@eleazar.dartmouth.edu
	(Earle R. Horton) writes:
>>     My requirements are simple: convert an editText item, input in
>>any font or script, to floating point extended or double using the new
>>Script Manager for full generality.
>
>Use the SANE routine Str2Num, which takes a string and returns an
>extended. According to IM V-302 (the docs for version 1 Script Man):
>    
>    Applications that want to check ASCII strings to see if they
>    are valid numeric fields, or convert ASCII strings to their
>    equivalent numeric values, should use the SANE routines to
>    do so. These routines will always return the correct result,
>    regardless of the script in which the number is written.

     According to the version 2 Script Manager manual, this is not
enough.  It mentions such things as alternate numeric character sets
that would have to be filtered to ASCII before SANE would accept them.
It also says that the new number routines (Script Manager version 2)
provide a means to read both formatted and simple numbers in any
script.  I've been through this document a couple times, and it is not
obvious how one would go about reading a simple number, given that the
number could be in any script and would not necessarily contain ASCII
digits.  There is also an example illustrating the tokenizer in the
new Script Manager, and showing what appear to be Japanese characters
being expanded to a string containing ASCII digits.

     So, the original question still stands:  How to read an arbitrary
number entered by the user in his local script using the latest Script
Manager for fullest generality?

Earle R. Horton