Did you guys consider the problem of newlines in content?
This is a good question. Implementing your own file format means you
have a big-bag-o-quoting problems. How do you print a verbatim
newline? What about a verbatim single quote? What about Unicode? What
about a new line then "not ok - ++$counter"? :)
http://cr.yp.to/qmail/guarantee.html says:
When another programmer wants to talk to a user interface, he has to
/quote/: convert his structured data into an unstructured sequence of
commands that the parser will, he hopes, convert back into the
original structured data.
This situation is a recipe for disaster. The parser often has bugs: it
fails to handle some inputs according to the documented interface. The
quoter often has bugs: it produces outputs that do not have the right
meaning. Only on rare joyous occasions does it happen that the parser
and the quoter both misinterpret the interface in the same way.
Things to think about :)
Regards,
Jonathan Rockway
