Capital 'E' or lower case 'e' as exponent marker in scientific strings / notation?
I have noticed that gnumeric prefers 'E
' for displaying, but 'e
' for writing to files, while LO Calc takes 'E
' for files too ( I don't have the original Excel at hand, but think to remember also 'E
' ).
For example: Input: '1e-20
' or '1E-20
', display in sheet: '1E−20
', saved in file '9.9999999999999995e-21
', affects *.xml, *.ods and possibly others.
No version is wrong or forbidden, for consistency / compatibility I would prefer a more uniform handling, but can't find where to adjust it right now. Can't even decide to try in gnumeric ( replace all occurrences of GNM_FORMAT_g
with '~_G
'??? ) or in goffice ( adjust 'go_format_as_XL
'??? ).
Personally I think 'E
' is better, it's clearer, I've seen it more often and according to this note at wikipedia it's less likely to be confused: 'In this usage the character e is not related to the mathematical constant e or the exponential function ex (a confusion that is unlikely if scientific notation is represented by a capital E).'
But I also saw a note at stackoverflow 'the latter (which is less common), with format string %E.'.
( Tested with gnumeric 1.12.50 rel. and actual 1.12.53 dev., pls. recheck carefully, my system qualifies for confusions between different installations. )
[ edit 2022-05-23 ] I really dislike brutalizing fine tuned programs like gnumeric that way, but for the moment replacing the format definitions in numbers.h with capital 'G
' strings also for GNM_FORMAT_**g**
helped me out. I added some formatting to the above in an attempt to avoid unwanted italics. [ /edit ]
[ edit 2022-05-30 ] It 'looks as if' a less brutal but sufficient way is to replace GNM_FORMAT_g
by GNM_FORMAT_G
in case VALUE_FLOAT:
of value_get_as_gstring
in src/value.c
. If further differentiation is needed a variant of that function and selective call by the write routines could be used. AFAICS as well ODF ( *.ods, OASIS ) as XML ( *.gnumeric, *.xml, W3C ) formats allow 'e' as well as 'E'. recheck would be appreciated. [ /edit ]