RE: [Yaml-core] Eliminate Unicode Escapes

[Oren Ben-K. <or...@ri...>]

Brian Ingerson [mailto:in...@tt...] wrote:
> I think we are sending a mixed signal by supporting the 
> unicode escapes: \U and \u. One one hand we are telling 
> people not to use them, but instead use real unicode editors. 
> This is manifest in the fact that we don't allow escapes in 
> the place where people might most want unicode: the folded block.
>
> On the other hand we taunt people with these silly escapes 
> that can only be used in a double quoted string.
> 
> Thoughts?

These escapes are meant to be used to represent _non-printable_ Unicode
characters. Granted most of the non-ASCII characters are printable, but not
all.

We want to be able to "print" a YAML document (to the screen at least)
without a problem. Hence we need these escapes, but they are rare enough so
restricting them to the double-quoted form is acceptable. There's no need to
allow escaping inside block scalars...

> But are you saying that if someone wants to add a unicode 
> character to 
> a nicely formatted folded scalar, they need to switch over 
> to the much 
> inferior
> (formatting-wise) double quoted scalar? No way!

The parser is required to take all non-ASCII characters in blocks anyway,
even if emitters should not emit non-printable ones there, so I don't see a
problem. If you have just one (printable) Unicode character, you can just
put it in directly.

Have fun,

	Oren Ben-Kiki