[libreoffice-users] When does one cell equal another?

 I use Libreoffice to process files over which I have no control. These 
are text files but sometimes contain unusual codes.

LO (3.6.5.2 on Vista) seems to handle some values in cells 
inconsistently ... open a new spreadsheet:

set A2 =CHAR(127)
set A3 =A1=A2
set A4 =A2=""

A3 contains FALSE
A4 contains TRUE

Surely A3 and A4 should be the same, since A1 contains the null string.

I have tried reporting the behaviour of LO in this area before(bug 
58838), with the reply below.
> >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
mariosv 2012-12-29 01:06:05 UTC
Hi David,

I think for this and other cases is there the EXACT() function, which is 
always false comparing any character against null, except with a blank cell.
I guess the soft hyphenation has a special meaning, so it is treated as 
null.
I do not think this is a bug.
> >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
According to the documentation for function CHAR, A2=CHAR(127) should be 
a text character which
doesn't depend on the system mapping. This appears to work and 
ISTEXT(A2) returns TRUE.

My questions are:

1. Is the behaviour above a bug?
2. If some character codes have a "special meaning" (as suggested by 
Mariosv), is this documented? If so, where? The ODF documentation copied 
below (ver 1.2) seems to imply that there are no special meanings and 
that in the above example A4 should be FALSE, and LO is violating the 
ODF specification.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>


     6.4.7Infix Operator "="

Summary: Report if two values are equal

Syntax: Scalar Left = Scalar Right

Returns: Logical

Constraints: None

Semantics: Returns TRUE if two values are equal. If the values differ in 
type, return FALSE. If the values are both Number, return TRUE if they 
are considered equal, else return FALSE. If they are both Text, return 
TRUE if the two values match, else return FALSE. For Text values, if the 
calculation setting HOST-CASE-SENSITIVE is false, text is compared but 
characters differencing only in case are considered equal. If they are 
both Logicals, return TRUE if they are identical, else return FALSE. 
Error values cannot be compared to a constant Error value to determine 
if that is the same Error value.

Evaluators may approximate and test equality of two numeric values with 
an accuracy of the magnitude of the given values scaled by the number of 
available bits in the mantissa, ignoring some least significant bits and 
thus providing compensation for not exactly representable values.

The result of “1=TRUE()” is FALSE for evaluators that implement a 
distinct Logical type and TRUE if they don't.

> >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

David Lynch
<http://docs.oasis-open.org/office/v1.2/cs01/OpenDocument-v1.2-cs01-part2.html#Infix_Operator_NE>




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