[CLN-list] Integer parser

[Bruno Haible]

Thomas Luthe wrote:
> The manual only states that the string must
> contain exactly one number if end_of_parse is null, which it is not in
> my example. In the non-null case read_integer itself checks the end of
> the integer input and stores the position of the character after the
> integer in *end_of_parse. This works as expected for any non-integer
> characters like +,*,-,... with / being the only exception.

What you say is clearly a desirable behaviour of the read_integer function.
However, I don't know whether read_integer can easily be changed to operate
this way: the rational number and complex number readers possibly depend
on the present behaviour.
Also, the comments in <cln/integer_io.h> say read_integer is "undocumented"
and that it "does strictly the same as the general read_complex".
So, the relation between read_integer and the other readers is not clear
to me.

Therefore I agree with Richy, better pre-parse the string yourself, and
use read_integer only for the second, number-crunching, phase.

Bruno