Re: Strings in gnumeric: implementing a gawk pipeline

[Oliver Burnett-Hall <olly burnett-hall co uk>]

Leonard Mada wrote:
> When the string is NOT found, instead of reporting a value of 0 (or -1), 
> gnumeric reports an ERROR (#VALUE), thus breaking any further operations 
> dependent on this result.

You can use the if() and iserror() functions to cope with cases where 
the search string isn't found.  This can make the formulas long, 
repetitive and unwieldy, but it does work.

[snip]

> What I really want is an easy way to run gawk scripts within gnumeric, i.e.:
> - gnumeric should open a bidirectional pipeline to gawk (gawk supports this)
> - (advanced: when macros will be implemented => gnumeric should 
> recognize the shebang line (e.g. #!gawk -parameters...), and use the 
> correct program, in this case gawk, for the particular script)

This would be a *huge* security hole.  awk's system() function would 
external commands to be run from within the spreadsheet, plus the 
standard I/O functions would permit modification of other files.

These are problems that you'll probably get from any scripting 
capability, but I'd hope they could be handled in a better way than the 
MS Office all-or-nothing approach to macros; invoking external awk 
scripts doesn't seem a solution to me.

- olly