Parsing scientific notation sensibly?

Question

I want to be able to write a function which receives a number in scientific notation as a string and splits out of it the coefficient and the exponent as separate items. I could just use a regular expression, but the incoming number may not be normalised and I'd prefer to be able to normalise and then break the parts out.

A colleague has got part way of an solution using VB6 but it's not quite there, as the transcript below shows.

cliVe> a = 1e6
cliVe> ? "coeff: " & o.spt(a) & " exponent: " & o.ept(a)
coeff: 10 exponent: 5

should have been 1 and 6

cliVe> a = 1.1e6
cliVe> ? "coeff: " & o.spt(a) & " exponent: " & o.ept(a)
coeff: 1.1 exponent: 6

correct

cliVe> a = 123345.6e-7
cliVe> ? "coeff: " & o.spt(a) & " exponent: " & o.ept(a)
coeff: 1.233456 exponent: -2

correct

cliVe> a = -123345.6e-7
cliVe> ? "coeff: " & o.spt(a) & " exponent: " & o.ept(a)
coeff: 1.233456 exponent: -2

should be -1.233456 and -2

cliVe> a = -123345.6e+7
cliVe> ? "coeff: " & o.spt(a) & " exponent: " & o.ept(a)
coeff: 1.233456 exponent: 12

correct

Any ideas? By the way, Clive is a CLI based on VBScript and can be found on my weblog.

Answer 1

Here is some Perl code I just hacked together quickly.

my($sign,$coeffl,$coeffr,$exp) = $str =~ /^\s*([-+])?(\d+)(\.\d*)?e([-+]?\d+)\s*$/;

my $shift = length $coeffl;
$shift = 0 if $shift == 1;

my $coeff =
  substr( $coeffl, 0, 1 );

if( $shift || $coeffr ){
  $coeff .=
    '.'.
    substr( $coeffl, 1 );
}

$coeff .= substr( $coeffr, 1 ) if $coeffr;

$coeff = $sign . $coeff if $sign;

$exp += $shift;

say "coeff: $coeff exponent: $exp";