ietf-nntp Draft summary of IETF 48 meeting

Charles Lindsey chl at clw.cs.man.ac.uk
Mon Aug 14 02:02:44 PDT 2000


In <yl8zu3d4ou.fsf at windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:

>> I see no problem with letting the 'gaps' between the various widlmats
>> represent arbitrary whitespace rather than single spaces.

>It means that you're not really dealing with a wildmat any more; you're
>dealing with some special matching syntax peculiar to PAT that's
>preprocessed into a wildmat.  That strikes me as rather ugly.

OK, I more or less understand PAT now, except for that bit. Yes, it is not
pretty, but neither are the alternatives. It would be worse to allow "2
spaces" between the wildmats to mean "match exactly 2 spaces here". How do
you match a Subject line with a fold in the middle? And so on.

So two questions remain.

1. What do existing implementations of XPAT do (the spec seems to suggest
that they match arbitrary whitespace)?

2. What else would you suggest? The only real alternative seems to be to
introduce /s or /040 or something (but how do you match a fold then)?

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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