I'm a bit confused, reading through the documentation available online.
Our first task in development is of course to parse an abc file. I'm
trying to figure out, per the 1.6 standard, WHAT EXACTLY the _approved_
linefeed/newline character, and encoding are for abc.
I have here, a quote from the mimetype vnd.abc document
<quote>
Encoding considerations:
The ABC language was designed to transmit folk melodies via
e-mail, and the majority of ABC files are 7-bit ASCII. The
encoding of non-ASCII characters is currently based on TeX.
It is expected that some files may use 8-bit ISO-8859-x
character encodings for material in text fields (e.g.,
comments, titles, proper names) which are not essential to the
interpretation of the music.
</quote>
Should I read this to mean that a parser should be designed to handle 7
and 8-bit ascii of differing character sets? Should a well designed abc
program 'be aware' of what format the file is in, and work to preserve
that format when editing is done w/in the program, and save it back in
that format? Or should it convert on opening, correcting any aberrations,
and save it as 'some preferred' type?
I've had some great problems with this in the past, as a user,
specifically with Abc2Win, which I mention not to pick on it, because I
don't know for sure that it's not my actions causing the problem, also, I
only mention it, because it is my favorite of those I've tried, and as
such, it's the one I have the most experience with.
The problems I've experienced, deal mostly with linefeeds and such.
Whether it's an unknown file off the internet, or one I've edited online
using pico or vi, or one I've edited on my pc using notepad, or more
often, programmers file editor (my editor of choice), I often end up with
a mixture of different linefeed tokens, even within the same file. Most
recently, as an example, I began an abc in PFE, and then opened it up in
ABC2Win. As I edited, I experienced all sorts of exciting abberations
whenever I hit my "enter" key. ABC2WIN is great about showing
non-printable characters when this happens, and they can be deleted, but
unless you 'trigger' them, you never know you've got them all. I thought
I had them all, till the next day when I opened the file back in abc2win,
and tried to display the tune. It of course went nuts cause I had left
lots of invisible garbage in the file, which produced many dialogue boxes
telling me, that I'd botched things, and then adding about 6 measures of
pure but musically exciting gibberish.
So.. My goal here, is to create a great program, but since it appears that
abc can be a great mixture of encodings, I either need to enforce a
standard and be fascist and convert and save everything to that encoding
(I doubt this is the answer), or try to make it very aware and dynamic,
not from file to file, but from line to line within a file.... So. Should
I make it anally retentively aware, and open, edit and save fils 'as is'
with hodgepodges of linefeed tokens and encodings, or should I prompt
users to do 'such and such', or ... dang. I just don't know.
I don't mind the work of building an encoding-aware parser. I wanna write
a great program. I just want to make the most educated decision/choice
regarding this most fundamental task of abc file handling.
So... I can research further, but my conclusions might be mistaken.
Anyone know the quintessential answer? Or is this one of those
ill-defined adventures in abc?
For those who think I might be bouncing alot of my questions off the list,
I surely am. I have no intention of reinventing the wheel, and not trying
to avail myself of this collection of knowledge.
Thanks
//Christian
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