[Frank Siebenlist <franks@mc...>]

Understood.

Your "inline literals" suggestion will solve this for me for now.

Thanks for the detailed explanation.

Regards, Frank.


David Goodger wrote:

> Frank Siebenlist wrote:
>  > I'm a bit confused about the error message that I receive after running
>  > the following two line file through buildhtml.py:
>  >
>  > -----
>  > like "http://www.acme.com/docs/*.txt";, which...
>  >
>  > both http://www.acme.com/doc/*.txt"; and
>  > "http://www.acme.com/otherdocs/*.txt";, but...
>  > -----
>  >
>  >     ::: Processing .txt: tst.txt
>  > /c/haskell/HEAD/xacml-haskell/delegation/tst.txt:1: (WARNING/2) Inline
>  > emphasis start-string without end-string.
>  >
>  > It doesn't seem to like the "*" in the first line but has no issue with
>  > the two equivalent "*"s in the second. Reversing the lines gives the
>  > same warning.
> 
> Easier to explain by example.  Use quicktest.py or publish.py to get
> easy-to-follow pseudo-XML output:
> 
>     $ quicktest.py <<EOF
>     > like "http://www.acme.com/docs/*.txt";, which...
>     >
>     > both http://www.acme.com/doc/*.txt"; and
>     > "http://www.acme.com/otherdocs/*.txt";, but...
>     > EOF
>     <stdin>:1: (WARNING/2) Inline emphasis start-string without end-string.
> 
> This is the stderr output.  Next is the pseudo-XML:
> 
>     <document source="<stdin>">
>         <paragraph>
>             like "
>             <reference refuri="http://www.acme.com/docs/">;
>                 http://www.acme.com/docs/
> 
> The parser recognizes a URL, but
> 
>             <problematic id="id2" refid="id1">
>                 *
> 
> It doesn't like the asterisk [1]_.
> 
>             .txt", which...
>         <system_message backrefs="id2" id="id1" level="2" line="1"
>          source="<stdin>" type="WARNING">
>             <paragraph>
>                 Inline emphasis start-string without end-string.
> 
> The parser thinks that the "*" is beginning *emphasis* in the text.  A
> side effect is that this breaks the URL in three.  The next paragraph
> contains two asterisks, which balance the emphasis, so no problem (as
> far as the parser is concerned):
> 
>         <paragraph>
>             both
>             <reference refuri="http://www.acme.com/doc/">;
>                 http://www.acme.com/doc/
>             <emphasis>
>                 .txt" and
>                 "http://www.acme.com/otherdocs/
>             .txt", but...
> 
> You might have a problem with the parser's interpretation though.
> 
> In this case, none of the asterisk-containing URLs are intended to be
> interpreted as clickable hyperlinks, so the solution is to make them
> inline literals:
> 
>     like ``http://www.acme.com/docs/*.txt``, which...
> 
>     both ``http://www.acme.com/doc/*.txt`` and
>     ``http://www.acme.com/otherdocs/*.txt``, but...
> 
> If you had a valid URL containing asterisks, you'd have to use a
> hyperlink target, or wait for the bug described below to be fixed.
> 
> .. [1] Upon reviewing RFC 2396, I see that asterisks are valid URL
>    characters, sometimes actually used.  Beni Cherniavsky found one in
>    mid-November and fixed it by modifying the text.  There's a
>    conflict with emphasis, but backslash escapes should overcome that;
>    they don't though.  I consider it a bug in the parser that escaped
>    asterisks in URLs aren't recognized.  I'll add it to the to-do
>    list.
> 

-- 
Frank Siebenlist               franks@...
The Globus Alliance - Argonne National Laboratory