[OASIS Issue Tracker] Commented: (OFFICE-1895) RIGHTB and friendsis incompletely specified

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    [ http://tools.oasis-open.org/issues/browse/OFFICE-1895?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=12009#action_12009 ] 

Dennis Hamilton commented on OFFICE-1895:
-----------------------------------------

It seems to me that the description at the beginning of 6.6 makes it clear that these work on fixed frames ("bytes") of an internal representation and are implementation-dependent.  That combined with definition by analogy to the definition RIGHT and similar counterparts (LEFT, MID) which do work on characters rather than bytes seems to nail things down pretty well.

HOWEVER: The use of "characters" in the description of these byte-oriented functions is misleading.  Also, the definition of byte is apparently meant to be of an implementation-defined unit which could be a UTF-16 frame or a UTF-8 frame or a plain octet in other encodings.  Note that so-called double-byte character encodings such as Shift-JIS use *up to* 2 octets (not always 2) for single characters in a sequence of octets.

I agree with Andreas that this is too mushy.  Characters should not be used in these descriptions when characters are not meant, even though the bytes returned *might* deliver a representation of an exact sequence of characters.

If something more than that is intended, a lot more careful definition is required.

> RIGHTB and friends is incompletely specified
> --------------------------------------------
>
>                 Key: OFFICE-1895
>                 URL: http://tools.oasis-open.org/issues/browse/OFFICE-1895
>             Project: OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) TC
>          Issue Type: Bug
>          Components: OpenFormula
>    Affects Versions: ODF 1.2
>            Reporter: Andreas Guelzow 
>
> 6.6.6 RIGHTB
> Summary: Return a selected number of text characters from the right, using byte position.
> This description fails to indicate what happens in the likely situation that the selected bytes do not form a complete character sequence. Should that be an error or move to a correct position?
> Similarly for  the otehr ...B functions

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