Fortunately the author wrote tests, so we can tie the behavior of the code to use cases. Unfortunately all the tests pass with the call to org-trim removed. Also the call is there from the first commit of the file in git, so there's no commit message to explain.

My guess is that it was added to clean up cases that resulted in extra trailing whitespace, but I dunno.

On Wed, Jul 15, 2020 at 7:12 PM Michaël Cadilhac <michael@cadilhac.name> wrote:

Hello,

Quick question here: in ob-C.el, before returning the output of a C
file, there's this line:

(setq results (org-trim (org-remove-indentation results)))

That seems quite arbitrary; is it on purpose? I have a C file that
outputs some sort of list of formatted numbers, e.g.:

0 -17.8
40 4.4
80 26.7
120 48.9

and only the first line gets trimmed, leading to a faulty output.

This does not seem to be a universal thing in Babel; for instance:

#+begin_src emacs-lisp :exports both :results value raw
" 0\n 1\n2\n"
#+end_src

…results in:

#+RESULTS:
0
1
2

But the same thing in C:

#+begin_src C :exports both :results output raw
printf (" 0\n 1\n2\n");
#+end_src

…results in:
#+RESULTS:
0
1
2

Cheers,
M.