On Wed, 25 Sep 2013, Sven Schreiber wrote: > 2) But this also doesn't work (with suitably defined variables): > > dummy = sscanf( strsub(isodate(newepochdate),"-",""), "%d", newdate ) > > while the non-nested variant does work: > > <hansl> > tempstr = strsub(isodate(newepochdate),"-","") > dummy = sscanf( tempstr, "%d", newdate ) > </hansl> > > Here I don't see why there should be a difference -- it rather looks as > if the earlier bug with string-producing functions hasn't been fully > squashed. The first one ought to work, agreeed, but the problem here is different from the earlier bug. The issue is that the sscanf() function uses the same mechanism as the (old, deprecated) "sscanf" command, which gets passed the whole line as a single argument. I guess it's time to get rid of the command version and redo sscanf() as a proper function.