[cindykrafft]

With the new -b / --number-nonblank (#3857, unreleased), --line-range and --highlight-line address the non-blank line count instead of file lines, so the same range shows different lines than with -n:

$ printf 'one\n\nthree\n\nfive\nsix\n' > f.txt
$ bat -n -r 3:5 --style=numbers f.txt     $ bat -b -r 3:5 --style=numbers f.txt
   3 three                                   
   4                                         3 five
   5 five                                    4 six

and bat -b -H 5 f.txt highlights nothing (there is no 5th non-blank line) instead of five. cat -b only changes the displayed numbers, and neither #3857 nor #3856 mentions ranges or highlights, so I assumed this wasn't intended; happy to be told otherwise.

Cause: in src/controller.rs the line counter skipped blank lines in -b mode, but the same counter drives the range and highlight checks (and the line-1 BOM strip). This counts file lines again and keeps a separate non-blank counter in the printer for the displayed number, so -b output is unchanged without -r/-H.

Tests: number_nonblank_line_range_uses_file_line_numbers and number_nonblank_highlight_line_uses_file_line_numbers in tests/integration_tests.rs fail on master and pass with the change; the existing -b tests are unchanged. Full cargo test (458 passed), cargo fmt --check and cargo clippy --all-targets are clean. The CHANGELOG also fills in #4076 for my earlier entry, which was merged with a placeholder.

Disclosure: this was found, reproduced and patched by an AI agent (Claude Code), which ran the reproduction and tests quoted above. It has not been separately reviewed by a human.

[hafizahmedzia]

Additional CLI checks of @cindykrafft's fix compared f748c1a467ae161682849949a7d036ab8362f9ba with 59a29e312bcf555b0fd289e8664dda467ec41bc6 on Linux, using Rust/Cargo 1.99.1 and the committed lockfile.

A 14-line fixture has nonblank content on physical lines 1, 3, 6, 7, 9, 11 and 14. With -b -r 1:3 -r 9:11 -H 11, the parent selects using nonblank positions and misses the second physical range/highlight. The PR head matches the -n physical-content/highlight oracle while displaying nonblank ordinals 1, 2, 5 and 6, including counting across discarded lines.

For -r ':-2' -H 11 and -r '-5:' -H 14, selected content already matches the physical oracle on the parent in this fixture, but the highlight is absent. The head preserves that content and highlights the requested physical line. LF-file and CRLF-stdin variants agree; no-range controls preserve numbering 1–7 on both.

All 16 comparisons (32 CLI processes) produced these expected results. Paging/config loading were disabled and an ANSI theme exposed highlighting. Clean package builds avoided cached same-version base-library reuse. This is focused CLI evidence; the full suite, fmt/clippy, CI and other platforms were not run.