gnucash master: A truly ancient bug, discovered with an Xcode-5.1 compiler warning.

[Geert Janssens]

On Tuesday 20 May 2014 02:41:55 Mike Alexander wrote:
> --On May 19, 2014 7:07:46 PM -0400 John Ralls
> <jralls at code.gnucash.org>
> wrote:
> > Updated	 via  https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash/commit/eabaee8e
> > (commit) 	from  https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash/commit/6e62ce99
> > (commit)
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > commit eabaee8eb58c557743b8b1b476b4145b97eb9836
> > Author: John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us>
> > Date:   Thu May 15 17:04:26 2014 -0700
> > 
> >     A truly ancient bug, discovered with an Xcode-5.1 compiler
> > 
> > warning.
> 
> Should this go on maint?
> 
While this is a bug I think it would not have had any influence in 
practise because the loop always breaks before the end of the string is 
reached for all known date formats.

But I have backported the fix to maint anyway.


And perhaps this is a good moment to point out that the routine itself 
is flawed and should be improved during the conversion to 
boost::datetime.

The issue with this routine is that it assumes that short date formats 
consist of only digits and a separator for all known locales. This is 
false. There are several oriental locales for which the short date 
format starts with a day-of-the-week field. For these locales the 
dateSeparator routine will return the first character of today's day of 
the week instead of the real separator. So every day of the week it 
would discover a different separator.

This is strongly related to bug 
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=497831 although the 
dateSeparator routine is only one part of the problem. The other part is 
the code that tries to guess an incompletely entered date in the 
register code. That part trips over the day-of-week part as well.

Hopefully boost::datetime can help here.

Geert