Re: strings in gnumeric / awk / etc.

[Leonard Mada <discoleo gmx net>]

I was quite busy lately, so take my apologies for this late reply.


Uri David Akavia wrote:
> I must have been misunderstanding something, since I was thinking
> about macros, similar to Excel. ...

No, I did NOT mean macros similar to Excel. I just wanted a Menu Entry: 
'Run Gawk Script':
- select some cells (e.g. B5:D50)
- Run Menu Entry : 'Run Gawk Script'
- gnumeric should open a dialog: 'Open gawk script', the user selects 
the gawk script
- gnumeric should open a bidirectional pipeline to gawk
  -- should pipeline the script to gawk
  -- should pipeline the values of the selected cells (through the 
bi-di pipeline) into gawk
  -- should re-import gawk's output

Having this possibility, would greatly expand gnumeric string 
manipulating functions (this functionality is currently very limited, 
both in gnumeric and in OOo Calc and MS Excel). And this functionality 
would be implemented with minimal effort, NO massive code changes inside 
gnumeric.

Priit Laes wrote:
> 5. Hire someone to write it for you - propose the bounty.

Well, I usually export the sheet as a text file (cvs), run gawk upon it 
and re-import the cvs file. BUT I believe, this is something that 
deserves to be included in gnumeric.

Morten Welinder wrote:
> 3. Write a plugin that allows you to feed a range to a script and read
>    the converted range from the output.  The best way for that
>    probably is to file an enhancement request at bugzilla.gnome.org
>    as the details probably should be spec'd out with some care. 

I will probably file this feature request. I did not have time to do it 
until now. Indeed, this is something that I believe is quite important. 
Actually, I believe that there should be a general mechanism to pipeline 
data from/to gnumeric, like gawk does. And this should be not limited to 
gawk. There are other programs that can be very useful for various users.

Kind regards,

Leonard Mada