Bug #3443: sprintf pads a null-character with a negative float

From: greg@bah.org Operating system: RH Linux 6.1 PHP version: 3.0.14 PHP Bug Type: Misbehaving function Bug description: sprintf pads a null-character with a negative float This is a really strange problem, but sprintf seems to be padding a null character to the end of a string when the string consists of a negative float. Here is a script that will reproduce the problem: <? $string = -122.440383; $new_string = sprintf("%0.6f", $string); echo "string = $string<br>\n"; echo "new_string = $new_string<br>\n"; for ($j=0;$j<strlen($new_string);$j++) { echo "letter #$j: " . ord($new_string[$j]) . "<br>\n"; } ?> The output on php-3.0.14, php-3.0.13, php-4.0b3 looks like: string = -122.440383 new_string = -122.440383 letter #0: 45 letter #1: 49 letter #2: 50 letter #3: 50 letter #4: 46 letter #5: 52 letter #6: 52 letter #7: 48 letter #8: 51 letter #9: 56 letter #10: 51 letter #11: 0 There is no null character at the end if the float is positive. I noticed that php-3.0.12 doens't exhibit this behavior. The way I configured all these different versions of php was: Configure command: ./configure '--with-mhash' '--with-mcrypt' '--disable-display-source' '--enable-debugger' '--enable-track-vars' '--enable-debug' '--with-xml' '--with-oracle' '--without-gd' '--with-apxs=../www/bin/apxs' The one major difference I know between my versions of php-3.0.12 and the others is that 3.0.12 compiles against an older version of mcrypt and all these others compile against a newwr version. This is probably irrelevant because I have no idea what mcrypt libraries would have to do with sprintf, but I thought I'd mention it. Thanks. -Greg