FastFEC outputs year fields as floats (2025.00 vs 2025)

[asg017]

Note

Much of this ticket was composed with Claude

In F3X/F3P cover records, the col_b_year field contains a 4-digit year value (e.g. 2025). FastFEC outputs this as 2025.00 (treating it as a float), while libfec correctly passes through the raw value 2025.

This is a FastFEC bug, not a libfec bug. The raw FEC data contains 2025 as a plain integer string, and libfec's passthrough is correct.

Documenting here for completeness since it causes a diff between the two tools.

Affected Filing

Filing ID: 1935668 (237KB, Chevron PAC F3XN filing)

Reproduction

libfec fastfec ~/.cache/libfec/cache/1935668.fec /tmp/out_libfec
fastfec --no-stdin ~/.cache/libfec/cache/1935668.fec /tmp/out_fastfec

Observe the Difference

# Extract the col_b_year field (field 51 in F3XN):
diff \
  <(sed -n '2p' /tmp/out_libfec/1935668/F3XN.csv | tr ',' '\n' | sed -n '51p') \
  <(sed -n '2p' /tmp/out_fastfec/1935668/F3XN.csv | tr ',' '\n' | sed -n '51p')
# < 2025
# ---
# > 2025.00

# Verify the raw FEC file has the integer form:
# (uses ASCII 28 / 0x1C as delimiter)
cat ~/.cache/libfec/cache/1935668.fec | tr '\x1c' '\n' | head -100 | grep -n '^2025$'
# Shows "2025" without decimal

Decision

No action needed on the libfec side - libfec's output is correct. This is a FastFEC quirk where it parses all numeric-looking values as floats.