John Chambers wrote:
All this being said, I don't see the point of the X: field. It may be useful as a tune start marker, but that's about all it's useful for. I see files all the time with cobbled together and duplicate numbered and non consecutive and out of order tune numberings. If it's being used as a tune begin marker, then for goodness sake, define a true tune begin and tune end marker as people certainly make unparsable files by embedding tunes in html files or emails where there is no clear <linebreak><linebreak>, and instead anSteven Bennett writes: | | Actually, this is sort of close to what my parser is doing, but you're | missing one *very* important thing -- the file fields. At the beginning of | the file (prior to the first X: or T:) and in-between tunes (ie. After the | first blank line in a tune, which ends the tune, and before the next X: or | T:) there may be a variety of settings which can affect the remaining tunes | in the file. In the ABC spec, these are the fields marked "Yes" for "File". | Their existence complicates the job considerably. | | Note that while ABC 1.6 and 1.7.6 explicitly allow these fields in-between | tunes, ABC 2.0 draft states they can only be at the beginning of a file. | (There really ought to be a note about this in the Deprecated Syntax | section... Or the restriction should be lifted.)
Well, that pretty much eliminates the idea of combining abc files through any simple mechanism! It used to be you could just catenate the files, and optionally renumber the X: lines. But if two files both have such global fields at the start, the resulting file won't be in a legal syntax.
endofabc<newline>TextOfEmailOrWebpage...
That said, people also put % comments above the X: sometimes
%comment<newline><newline>X:,
and also below
endofabc<newline><newline> %comment
and expect it to be attributed to the below or above tune in ignorance of any sort of standard.
Looking for the X: doesn't seem to be a very safe form of parsing for the beginning of a tune, and <newline><newline> or <newline>EOF a very safe form of looking for the end of a file.
X: seems just useless as an index, and rather pointless.
--
//Christian
Christian Marcus Cepel | And the wrens have returned & [EMAIL PROTECTED] icq:12384980 | are nesting; In the hollow of 371 Crown Point, Columbia, MO | that oak where his heart once 65203-2202 573.999.2370 | had been; And he lifts up his Computer Support Specialist, Sr. | arms in a blessing; For being University of Missouri - Columbia | born again. --Rich Mullins
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