Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!uunet!bu-cs!bloom-beacon!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!MITVMA.MIT.EDU!cyclops%TAMUNIX.BITNET
From: cyclops%TAMUNIX.BITNET@MITVMA.MIT.EDU (Glenn Vanderburg)
Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.bug
Subject: nulls in strings passed to format
Message-ID: <8809301814.AA13969@prep.ai.mit.edu>
Date: 30 Sep 88 18:23:05 GMT
Sender: daemon@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
Distribution: gnu
Organization: GNUs Not Usenet
Lines: 21

I have a question about emacs lisp.  The format function is not
behaving the way I expect it to.  The reason I'm writing is that it
behaves precisely the way I *want* it to, but before I write code that
depends on this unexpected behavior, I'd like to know if this is a
feature or a bug.

As I understand it, strings in gnu emacs can contain nulls.  This fits
the facts: (princ "a\000a") prints "a
appears to believe otherwise: (princ (format "a%ca%c\000%ca" ?b ?b
?b)) prints "abab", and (princ (format "a%sa" "b\000b")) prints "aba".
A null in any string passed as an argument to format terminates the
string.

Now, this is not surprising, since format is written in C.  I would
personally like for it to stay this way (at least for the application
I'm writing now) but I'd like to know if this is considered a bug,
because I don't want to write code that depends on a feature which may
be "fixed" soon.

Regards,
Glenn Vanderburg