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Re: [ddlm-group] Triple-quoted strings

The current proposal to deal with nested quotes, for all the quoted
strngs in CIF2 is to work python-style:

   1.  The reverse-solidus (\) is used to escape all quote marks and
the reverse solidus itself
   2.  All quotes strings will terminate on the first uneascaped
closing quote, indpendent of whether it is followed by a blank.
   3.  All CIF2 writers are required to follow any closing quote with
a separator appropriate to the context, i.e. on the top level with
whitespace, or in a list by a comma or a close brace, etc.
   4.  The reverse-solidus itself would always be passed to the
application to decide what to do with it.

Thus the following would be used to nest treble quote

""" here we are inside \""" treble quotes \""" """

and the application would receive

here we are inside \""" treble quotes \"""

   -- HJB
=====================================================
  Herbert J. Bernstein, Professor of Computer Science
    Dowling College, Kramer Science Center, KSC 121
         Idle Hour Blvd, Oakdale, NY, 11769

                  +1-631-244-3035
                  yaya@dowling.edu
=====================================================

On Tue, 27 Oct 2009, Joe Krahn wrote:

> 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
> _______________________________________________
> ddlm-group mailing list
> ddlm-group@iucr.org
> http://scripts.iucr.org/mailman/listinfo/ddlm-group
>
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