ken wrote:
> >Forgive the comment from the peanut gallery, but if the code is
> >already handling ^# specially, why not go all the way and make it
> >a comment character? Is there a use for supporting #foo as a command?
>
> Sigh. First off, it's not handling #^ specially, it's handling #:
> specially. #foo, for example (really #foo:) receives no special handling.
>
> Secondly ... you may or may not have noticed that the profile has a
> format which looks suspiciously like an RFC-822 message, in that all of
> the fields have the form:
>
> foo: XXXX XXXX
>
> and you may not be aware that you're not permitted blank lines in a profile
> file either. Neither of these things are a coincidence.
>
> The same parser that reads email messages (m_getfld()) also reads the
> profile (also, it does sequence files). So to truely handle comments
> would require changes to m_getfld(), which nobody is itching to do.
m_getfld() takes a "FILE *". perhaps rather than handing it the config
file directly, we could do:
sprintf(cfgcmd, "sed -e 's/^[[:space:]]#/d' -e '/^$/d' %s", configfile);
f = popen(cfgcmd, "r");
paul
(only half kidding)
> In theory we could simply ignore fields which begin with a '#' and not
> put them in the profile structure; that might be worth doing. But that
> would still not permit '#' as a generic comment character; you'd still
> need to have a colon in there. It's one of those old MH things that
> isn't wonderful, but none of the fixes are easy.
>
> --Ken
>
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=----------------------
paul fox, [email protected] (arlington, ma, where it's 73.6 degrees)
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