[Caml-list] int/float_of_string

[Christophe TROESTLER <debian00@tiscali.be>]

Hi,

I noticed that there are some disparities in the way string are
converted to int/float :

        Objective Caml version 3.06+36 (2003-06-19)

# int_of_string "34\000xx";;
- : int = 34
# float_of_string "34\000xx";;
Exception: Failure "float_of_string".

Is this intentional?  I suppose it is not and float_of_string does the
right thing.

On a related note, it seems that the only way to decode an int/float
within a string is to create a new string containing the substring.
Moreover one must know the length of the number in advance.  Wouldn't
it be useful to have primitives like:

int_of_string_at : string -> int -> (int, int)
float_of_string_at : string -> int -> (int, float)

with usage like 

let (pos_after_the_number, decoded_number) = float_of_string_at s start

?  (I know such thing can be done with Scanf but I believe such
primitives can simplify and speed up¹ Scanf with no slowdown on
int_of_string / float_of_string.)

Cheers,
ChriS


---
¹ For what simple minded benchs worth, int_of_string can be as much as
1000% faster than Scanf.

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