Re: More precise tag following

Linus Torvalds [off-list ref] writes:

But for the actual viewer parts, which don't need internal git knowledge, 
let's just document the blame format, so that others can do it:

The new format is fairly easy to parse: each blame entry is always

 - starts with a line of

	<40-byte hex sha1> <sourceline> <resultline> <num_lines>

 - the first time that commit shows up in the stream, it has various
   other information about it printed out with a one-word tag at the 
   beginning of each line about that "extended commit info" (author, 
   email, committer, dates, summary etc)

 - each entry is _always_ finished by a

	"filename" <whitespace-quoted-filename-goes-here>

and thus it's really quite easy to parse for some line- and word-oriented 
parser (which should be quite natural for most scripting languages).

NOTE! For people who do parsing: to make it more robust, just ignore any 
lines in between the first and last one ("<sha1>" and "filename" lines) 
where you don't recognize the tag-words (or care about that particular 
one) at the beginning of the "extended information" lines. That way, if 
there is ever added information (like the commit encoding or extended 
commit commentary), a blame viewer won't ever care.

Thanks for these notes, which I should have written.  I would
also caution them to ignore if there is anything they do not
understand between "filename" and <sha1>.

A sample code to parse it in Perl was just posted by me ;-).