Re: gEDA-user: gEDA file format - couple of questions on attributes.

[Peter Brett <peter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Kai-Martin Knaak <kmk@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> Rather than restrict the input to a smallish subset, the code should
> deal gracefully with as much of UTF8 as possible.

Um, the code deals just fine with attribute names containing arbitrary
UTF-8.  It's just not *recommended* to use attribute names that don't
match the regexp I supplied.

> What is the rationale to this restriction?

It's not a restriction, it's a recommendation.  The main reasons are
that:

1) We need to support gnetlist backends when gEDA is compiled against
   Guile 1.8.x, which doesn't understand UTF-8. BTW, if you want to use
   non-ASCII characters in your attributes, I highly recommend to use
   Guile 2.x.

2) In the future, we may wish to do clever things with attribute names,
   perhaps giving characters like '#', '/' or ':' on the left hand side
   of the '=' in an attribute special meaning to gnetlist.  If you stick
   to the regexp I provided, you will be future-proof.

To repeat: you can use any Unicode codepoints you like in attribute
names at the moment.  However, at the moment it's safest to stick to
'^[a-z][a-z0-9_-\.]*$'.

Regards,

                               Peter

P.S. To clarify, attributes *must* match '^(.*[^ ])=([^ ].*)$'
(multiline) at the moment.

-- 
Peter Brett <peter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Remote Sensing Research Group
Surrey Space Centre



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