Re: [Xlog-discussion] RE: Hold your (xlog-) horses - suggestion

[Stephane Fillod]

On Tue, Jan 08, 2002, Tomi Manninen wrote:
> > Also, Joop, watch out for that ":" - you may find it in other places - time
> > field.
> 
> I think we could live with making ':' an illegal character inside a
> message. The sending program would have the resposibility for making sure
> ':' never appears in the data. Moreover I would like to have the date and
> time fields have much stricter syntax. My suggestion would be:

Actualy it doesn't matter if a ':' appear in the data field, as long as
the *field name* does not allow the ':' character.
Why? simply because the parser knows that the data field is from the
_first_ ':' after the field name to the first '\1' marker.
You wouldn't believe the source code  it's so easy to achieve that.

> All fields padded with zeros as necessary. Time in 24h format of course
> (and I think that even though we probably just throw away the seconds they
> should still be there). Also both always in UTC.
> 
> Again this would be more work for Joop as it would be xlog's job to do the 
> final formatting...

No big deal. This just a matter of a couple of line of code.
Flexibility and good design is more important thant a couple of line of
code.

> Joop, I'll do the '\n' change and send a patch to you soon. I actually

Would it be possible to not use '\n' instead of '\1' ? 
Some psk31 programs may want to include carriage return in the comment
field.

73,
Stephane F8CFE