[BUG] fractional bin sizes do not work in some locales (e.g., de_DE.UTF-8)

[Erik Auerswald]

Hi all,

while looking at the binning issues reported by Andreas Schamanek[0] I
noticed that providing floating point numbers as bin sizes does not work
when using a locale where comma (',') is used as decimal separator:

    $ echo $LC_NUMERIC
    de_DE.UTF-8

    $ locale -k LC_NUMERIC
    decimal_point=","
    thousands_sep="."
    grouping=3;3
    numeric-decimal-point-wc=44
    numeric-thousands-sep-wc=46
    numeric-codeset="UTF-8"

    $ echo 1,15 | datamash bin:0,1 1
    datamash: missing field for operation ‘bin’

Escaping the comma with a backslash ('\,') does not work:

    $ echo 1,15 | datamash bin:0\\,1 1
    datamash: invalid operand ‘\\,1 1’

    $ echo 1,15 | datamash 'bin:0\,1' 1
    datamash: invalid operand ‘\\,1 1’

Just using a period ('.') as decimal separator for the bin size does
not work either:

    $ echo 1,15 | datamash bin:0.1 1
    datamash: invalid operand ‘.1 1’

Using a locale where a period ('.') is used as decimal separator works:

    $ echo 1.15 | env LC_NUMERIC=C datamash bin:0.1 1
    1.1

So far I have only explored the problem, I have not yet looked at
the code.

Br,
Erik

[0] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-datamash/2022-06/msg00024.html