Re: Arbritary characters (like colons) in node names (proposal)

[Gavin Smith]

On Sat, Apr 19, 2014 at 5:47 PM, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:
> That's better, IMO.  I think we already use ^? for different purposes
> (in the Tag Table), though.  Not sure if that matters, but see below.
>

^? characters would only be inter
>> I.e., no quoting of file names at all, and quoting node names in ^?
>> (0xFF) when they contain forbidden characters. I don't think this
>> looks too bad.
>
> ^? is 0x7F, not 0xFF.
>
>> E.g.,
>> "File: quoting.info, Node: Top, Prev: Normal 1, Next: ^?std::cout^?,
>> Up: Normal 2"
>>
>> for a node line.
>
> Did you try this with Tag Tables?

A tag table looks like this:

^_
Tag Table:
Node: Top^?89
Node: Ch1^?292
Ref: Overview-Footnote-1^?30045
 ^_
End Tag Table

The quoting could be like this:

^_
Tag Table:
Node: Top^?0
Node: ^?std::cout^?98
Node: Normal 1^?178
Node: Normal 2^?304
^_
End Tag Table

This particular case worked well - I could still get to the other
nodes with "g" (see attachment), although it is conceivable that there
could be problems, depending on what characters appear in the
node/anchor name. If problems do occur with this, one solution would
be to have a second tag table section in the file.

> It's okay not to solve the cases where an Info file use ^_ (I don't
> think you will find any of these, for this very reason).  But I don't
> think we can just disregard the control characters that do no harm
> today, because an Info reader that will try interpreting them as a
> quote might do some very wrong things with them, or even crash.  IMO,
> if we want the solution to stand the test of time, it should provide
> some way of having "harmless" control characters in the file, without
> interpreting them as quotes.

The control characters would only be interpreted as quotes in
particular contexts. Any outside those contexts would be left as they
are. For example, if a manual contained

"Type the ^? character"

and the ^? was a literal ^?, it would be passed straight through,
because it is not part of a node specification.

quoting.info
Description: Binary data