Re: [PATCH] Fixed incomplete and incorrect treatment of comments and trailing whitespace

[Erik Auerswald]

Hi,

On Mon, May 16, 2022 at 09:03:42AM +0200, Erik Auerswald wrote:
> On Sun, May 15, 2022 at 06:06:21PM -0700, Dima Kogan wrote:
> > Addresses two related issues:
> > 
> > - Comments that didn't block out a whole line weren't being properly 
> > ignored by
> >   -C. Lines such as 'bar 5#xxx' didn't ignore the '#xxx' as they were 
> > supposed
> >   to
> 
> I think that would be a new feature.  The --help output states:
> 
>     -C, --skip-comments       skip comment lines (starting with '#' or ';'
>                                 and optional whitespace)
> 
> As far as I understand the documentation, the -C, --skip-comments option
> was intended to skip complete lines.

Treating any ';' in a line as starting a comment would interfere with
using ';' as field separator.  But using ';' as field separator is common
with simple CSV-like formats when the locale's decimal separator is a ','.

I do not think that the -C, --skip-comments behavior of GNU datamash
should change to recognize comments at the end of a data line
unconditionally.

Thanks,
Erik