Hi all,

I've hit an interesting case revolving around trimming and number patterns that doesn't seem quite sane to me.

Consider an element with the following properties:
textTrimKind='padChar'
textNumberPadCharacter='0'
textNumberPattern='0000+;0000-'

So we have the sign character at the end of the representation.  Now, imagine that the data being parsed is "0000+".  The relevant rules from the DFDL specification are:
When 'padChar', the element is trimmed of the dfdl:textStringPadCharacter, dfdl:textNumberPadCharacter, dfdl:textBooleanPadCharacter or dfdl:textCalendarPadCharacter  depending on the type of the element. When parsing, if the pad character is '0' and the SimpleContent region consists entirely of '0' characters, then the last remaining '0' is not trimmed and a single '0' is the result of the trimming.  This rule also applies when the pad character is a DFDL character entity equivalent to '0'. This rule does not apply when the pad character is any other character nor when a pad byte is specified. Describes all of the pattern syntax.


In our hypothetical case, the content region is not all zeros, as it ends in '+'.  This means that the rule in section 13.6 does not apply and we only apply the rule in 13.2.  This results in us trimming away all of the zeros and ending up with '+'.  This then doesn't parse as a number.

The problem seems to be that the rule in Section 13.6 doesn't take into account that the suffix of the pattern can result in text in the content region that isn't part of the digits of the number.  Should the rule under section 13.56 be something more like this...

When parsing, if the pad character is '0' and the SimpleContent region consists entirely of '0' characters, or the SimleContent region consists of a string of '0' characters followed by non-digit characters, then the last remaining '0' is not trimmed and a single '0' is the result of the trimming.  This rule also applies when the pad character is a DFDL character entity equivalent to '0'. This rule does not apply when the pad character is any other character nor when a pad byte is specified.


Thoughts?

Andy
Andy Edwards - IBM Integration Bus - DFDL

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