Bug #11648: Undocumented features of String#oct

• Status: Closed
• Assignee: matz (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
• Target version: -
• ruby -v: ruby 2.2.3p173 (2015-08-18 revision 51636) [x86_64-linux]
• Backport: 2.0.0: UNKNOWN, 2.1: UNKNOWN, 2.2: UNKNOWN

[mwpastore (Mike Pastore)]

String#oct will adjust the base of the stringy number being converted to 2 (if prefixed with 0B), 8 (also the default, if prefixed with 0O), 10 (if prefixed with 0D), or 16 (if prefixed with 0X). Much to my surprise this behavior is not documented at ruby-doc.org [1]. Is this the intended behavior and if so should the documentation be updated? If it is not the intended behavior, perhaps String#oct should raise an exception if someone tries to use this undocumented feature?

1. http://ruby-doc.org/core-2.2.3/String.html#method-i-oct

[yugui (Yuki Sonoda)]

• Assignee set to matz (Yukihiro Matsumoto)

It is surprising for me too. But this behavior was introduced in r373 by intention.
I hope Matz remembers the original intention.

I guess Ruby followed the behavior of Perl and it was useful to handle string representation of file permissions?

[nobu (Nobuyoshi Nakada)]

• Status changed from Open to Closed

Applied in changeset r53122.

---

string.c: radix indicators [ci skip]

• string.c (rb_str_oct): [DOC] mention radix indicators.
  [ruby-core:71310] [Bug #11648]