qobject: Document more shortcomings in our number handling

We've already documented that our JSON parsing is locale dependent;
but we should also document that our JSON output has the same
problem.  Additionally, JSON requires finite values (you have to
upgrade to JSON5 to get support for Inf or NaN), and our output
truncates floating point numbers to the point of losing significant
precision that could cause the receiver to read a different value.

Sadly, this series is not going to be the one that addresses these
problems.

Fix some trailing whitespace I noticed in the vicinity.

Signed-off-by: Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>
Message-Id: <1454075341-13658-2-git-send-email-eblake@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com>

diff --git a/qobject/json-parser.c b/qobject/json-parser.c
index 77c9382c5e277ec164ca91482c49ce6ec67a0dc0..6c05f6cc7088da47d302979c8fe236fd48f3c52a 100644 (file)
--- a/qobject/json-parser.c
+++ b/qobject/json-parser.c
@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
 /*
- * JSON Parser 
+ * JSON Parser
  *
  * Copyright IBM, Corp. 2009
  *
@@ -518,7 +518,9 @@ static QObject *parse_literal(JSONParserContext *ctxt)
         /* fall through to JSON_FLOAT */
     }
     case JSON_FLOAT:
-        /* FIXME dependent on locale */
+        /* FIXME dependent on locale; a pervasive issue in QEMU */
+        /* FIXME our lexer matches RFC 7159 in forbidding Inf or NaN,
+         * but those might be useful extensions beyond JSON */
         return QOBJECT(qfloat_from_double(strtod(token->str, NULL)));
     default:
         abort();

diff --git a/qobject/qjson.c b/qobject/qjson.c
index b8cc4ca9641aa2ea37365769c591b91dd980f894..06dc210cbf796735600a84853879243f5707fc9c 100644 (file)
--- a/qobject/qjson.c
+++ b/qobject/qjson.c
@@ -238,6 +238,15 @@ static void to_json(const QObject *obj, QString *str, int pretty, int indent)
         char buffer[1024];
         int len;
 
+        /* FIXME: snprintf() is locale dependent; but JSON requires
+         * numbers to be formatted as if in the C locale. Dependence
+         * on C locale is a pervasive issue in QEMU. */
+        /* FIXME: This risks printing Inf or NaN, which are not valid
+         * JSON values. */
+        /* FIXME: the default precision of 6 for %f often causes
+         * rounding errors; we should be using DBL_DECIMAL_DIG (17),
+         * and only rounding to a shorter number if the result would
+         * still produce the same floating point value.  */
         len = snprintf(buffer, sizeof(buffer), "%f", qfloat_get_double(val));
         while (len > 0 && buffer[len - 1] == '0') {
             len--;
@@ -248,7 +257,7 @@ static void to_json(const QObject *obj, QString *str, int pretty, int indent)
         } else {
             buffer[len] = 0;
         }
-        
+
         qstring_append(str, buffer);
         break;
     }