Re: [Yaml-core] comments and whitespace

[Neil K. <neilk@ActiveState.com>]

On Fri, Sep 14, 2001 at 12:52:48PM -0700, Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 13, 2001 at 09:16:36PM -0400, Kirrily 'Skud' Robert wrote:
> 
> > I desperately want YAML to support vertical whitespace (blank lines) and
> > comments.  
> 
> For what it's worth, I (yaml.py implementer) would like to see these 
> things too.

hrm, although I can see the value in NOT having vertical whitespace.
What if you have a value you want to store as a block, and it has several
significant blank lines at the end? The simplest thing I can think of is
to have a '.' end of block character.

foo: 
    This block has two significant blank lines at the end
 
    No really


    .

bar:
    This is the next value


In practice, this means, 

for deserialization:
    trim trailing whitespace from all block values
    if the final characters are '\n.\n', remove the '.\n'
for serialization: 
    if the value has whitespace at the end, tack on '.\n'
    
BTW, this can also handle the case about chomping final
newline!

chomped:
    This will be chomped
notchomped:
    This will NOT be chomped
    .



-- 
Neil Kandalgaonkar, ActiveState
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