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[ddlm-group] Triple-quoted strings

• To: ddlm-group@iucr.org
• Subject: [ddlm-group] Triple-quoted strings
• From: Joe Krahn <krahn@niehs.nih.gov>
• Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:44:45 -0400

I just joined the DDL list. Here is my view on triple-quoted strings. I 
hope I'm not missing something already covered on the list.

IMHO, triple-quoting is not a very good solution for multi-line text. 
You still have to define a way to escape a literal triple-quote. Why not 
just stick with the existing newline-semicolon method, and only have to 
define a special escape code for a semicolon at the beginning of a line? 
It is backward-compatible because older CIF's simply do not have 
embedded newline-semicolon. With triple-quotes, you have to deal with 
the possibility of """ being a quoted quote character.

Another possibility is to remove a leading space from all lines within a 
semicolon-quoted block. Most CIF text blocks already formatted that way, 
so that the first line of text with the semicolon is at the same 
indentation level as the remaining lines. For example:

;11111
  22222
  33333
;

is a quoted block representing:

11111
22222
33333


Even though some people might like triple-quoting due to being Python 
users, I think that the alternatives are a better fit into the existing 
syntax.

Joe Krahn
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