On Tue, Feb 07, 2006 at 10:28:00PM +0100, Roland Illig wrote:
> joerg@britannica.bec.de wrote:
> >A solution adopted by the Open Group as extension in the Single Unix
> >Specification is to allow positional arguments in the format string, so
> >that
> >	printf(_("%d/%d/%d"), year, month, day);
> >would have a translated format string for German as
> 
>         "%3$d.%2$d.%1$d" of course.
> 
> (Though I can understand this typo very well, as this is awful to type.)

It is also almost impossible to code and use correctly [1].
Never mind the security implications of allowing $n in printf strings
read from message files.

	David

"%*.*s" is equivalent to "%3$*1$.*2$s" - note that the numbers aren't in
order.

-- 
David Laight: david@l8s.co.uk