as_float() doesn't take the default value

[ilya1725]

I've tried passing the default values (not 0) to as_float() method described here. It doesn't seem to take it. The method still returns 0 when it can't convert the XML data.

[zeux]

Just to make sure, are you referring to the case where the attribute is present, but contains values that do not represent a valid floating point number?

[ilya1725]

Yes

[zeux]

So in general this is currently working as documented (documentation says that conversion issues result in unspecified values). In terms of implementation, this is currently tracked as #15 (for integer parsing there's now custom validation code, but the behavior hasn't been changed to use the default value; for floating point parsing currently pugixml relies on strtod, that has some issues wrt error reporting).

Thinking about this, I realized that in one specific case the current behavior can be more surprising than usual, which is when the contents is empty. I could change the code to check that case specifically, although I'm not sure if in your case the value is empty as opposed to a non-empty string that just happens to not be a number.

[ilya1725]

So I've tried two tests:
This is the data:
<index3 x='10' y='W178.314'/>
this is the code:
y.as_float(-12345.6) << ":'" << y.value()
the output:
0:'W178.314

With empty data:
<index3 x='10' y=''/>
output:
0:'

[zeux]

Yeah, my question is whether fixing this for just empty data is interesting to you. The default values were originally intended for use when attributes just don't exist, i.e. <index3 x='10' /> in your example, which is why the current implementation only checks for that - but full validation is more complicated (#15 has some details)

[ilya1725]

It didn't work for the invalid float either.
To be honest I don't really care, as long as the API does what the documentation says it should. It was my misunderstanding of the API. The documentation says "If attribute handle is null def argument is returned (which is 0 by default). " So the def technically only applicable to null handle and not the data itself.
It is up to you, this issue can be closed.

[zeux]

Ok, for now I will just treat this as part of #15 then.