prometheus / prometheus/docs

Prometheus refuses to parse valid-by-spec metrics (Golang hex floats)

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Description

What did you do?

$ echo 'testmetric 0x1p0' | promtool check metrics

What did you expect to see?

testmetric no help text

According to https://prometheus.io/docs/instrumenting/exposition_formats/ , valid input to https://pkg.go.dev/strconv#ParseFloat should be a valid metric value.
Go's ParseFloat supports hexademical fp numbers, like e.g. "0x1p0"

What did you see instead? Under which circumstances?

error while linting: text format parsing error in line 1: expected float as value, got "0x1p0"

Prometheus, contrary to go's ParseFloat() does not support hexademical fp values, due to them containing a 'p'.
(I believe this is due to https://github.com/prometheus/common/blob/ca1f99be33b31b804a85a42cb7d3a1df23500bf8/expfmt/text_parse.go#L771 )

I encountered this issue after I wrote instrumentation code that outpus hexadecimal floats, and then noticed that Prometheus unexpectedly (and I believe contrary to spec) rejected them.

System information

No response

Prometheus version
2.30.3
(My distribution broke prometheus --version; I do not think this is crucial, since the relevant code seems to have been unchanged for multiple years.)
Prometheus configuration file

No response

Alertmanager version

No response

Alertmanager configuration file

No response

Logs

No response

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start with the Prometheus exposition format documentation and the promtool check metrics entry point described in the report. Compare the documented value syntax with Go's strconv.ParseFloat and inspect expfmt/text_parse.go around line 771. Done means the documented valid hexadecimal float example is accepted without the reported parsing error.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
go
Domain
observability-sre
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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