Decimal number format changes with language

[blurpy]

I received a report from a German user that QA401W isn't displaying anything, but that requests seem to go OK between the browser and QA401H. I was able to reproduce, and it looks like this after doing an acquisition:

There are no errors in the log of QA401H, and no errors in the console or network tab of the developer tools in the browser.

What happens is that if you configure your OS (at least on Linux) to some languages, the number format changes, and QA401H adapts. The browser does not though, so the JSON parser fails to interpret the numbers.

This is how it is normally for me:

curl -d "" -X PUT http://localhost:9401/Settings/AudioGen/Gen1/On/1000/0 
{ "SessionId":"0" }

curl -d "" -X POST http://localhost:9401/Acquisition 
{ "SessionId":"2290222104" }

curl http://localhost:9401/Phase/Seconds 
{ "SessionId":"2290222104", "Left":"0.00020784909723370925", "Right":"0.00020576029083909996" }

curl http://localhost:9401/ThdDb/1000/20000
{ "SessionId":"2290222104", "Left":"-102.82025498084323", "Right":"-102.46467345532238" }

curl http://localhost:9401/ThdPct/1000/20000
{ "SessionId":"2290222104", "Left":"0.0007227485864607289", "Right":"0.0007529503287253446" }

Floats use period as the decimal separator.

This is how it looks if I change the language to German:

curl -d "" -X PUT http://localhost:9401/Settings/AudioGen/Gen1/On/1000/0 
{ "SessionId":"0" }

curl -d "" -X POST http://localhost:9401/Acquisition 
{ "SessionId":"3592625235" }

curl http://localhost:9401/Phase/Seconds 
{ "SessionId":"3592625235", "Left":"0,0005415564663523863", "Right":"0,0005391615949382826" }

curl http://localhost:9401/ThdDb/1000/20000
{ "SessionId":"3592625235", "Left":"-102,99914694724458", "Right":"-102,03344721080657" }

curl http://localhost:9401/ThdPct/1000/20000
{ "SessionId":"3592625235", "Left":"0,0007080153160940537", "Right":"0,00079127535504247" }

Suddenly floats use comma as the decimal separator.

I started QA401H like this to reproduce:

LANG="de_DE.UTF-8" dotnet QA401H.dll

It looks like the JSON standard expect floats to use period as the separator:

• https://www.json.org/json-en.html (see number)
• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/JSON (see PositiveNumber)

That also seems consistent with the behaviour the user experienced.
Is it possible to make QA401H return a consistent number format no matter the language?

[QuantAsylum]

I'm not able to repro, but you are right that json should not change depending on language + culture.

The attached version has made the output culture-invariant, which should yield the needed behavior. I first tried on 0.999. I tried to force:

set DOTNET_CLI_UI_LANGUAGE=de_DE

And then, asking dotnet for --help gives

.NET Core SDK (3.1.301)
Syntax: dotnet [runtime-options] [path-to-application] [arguments]

Hiermit wird eine .NET Core-Anwendung ausgeführt.

runtime-options:
  --additionalprobingpath <path>   Pfad, der die Suchrichtlinie und die zu suchenden Assemblys enthält.
  --additional-deps <path>         Pfad zur zusätzlichen Datei "deps.json".

So the language did change. But then doing an acq and

http://localhost:9401/RmsDbv/20/20000

gives the following:

This has the decimal points as periods in spite of being in German on version 0.999. But this might not be a surprise because sometimes you can't switch culture completely. In any case, the outputs should be cultural invariant for 0.9991 if you have time to try. Looks like this release also has correction to phase inversion on inputs.

QA401H_v0.9991.zip

[blurpy]

Thanks! I tested it and it now works for me with German language, as well as English.
I will ask the user to verify as well, to make sure.

[blurpy]

Regarding phase, it's definitely different now.

This is how phase used to look, in loopback:

And now it's like this:

Does it look like expected?

[blurpy]

I got a confirmation that v0.9991 works like it should with German language setup!

[blurpy]

Still curious about whether that negative phase is expected in the new version?