[PATCH v3 4/4] config.txt: describe handling of whitespace further
From: Dragan Simic <hidden>
Date: 2024-03-18 22:24:29
Subsystem:
documentation, the rest · Maintainers:
Jonathan Corbet, Linus Torvalds
Make it more clear what the whitespace characters are in the context of git
configuration files, and improve the description of the trailing whitespace
handling a bit, especially how it works out together with the presence of
inline comments.
Signed-off-by: Dragan Simic <redacted>
---
Notes:
Changes in v3:
- Patch description was expanded a bit, to make it more on point
- No changes to the documentation were introduced
Changes in v2:
- No changes were introduced
Documentation/config.txt | 19 +++++++++++--------
1 file changed, 11 insertions(+), 8 deletions(-)
diff --git a/Documentation/config.txt b/Documentation/config.txt
index 782c2bab906c..20f3300dc706 100644
--- a/Documentation/config.txt
+++ b/Documentation/config.txt@@ -22,9 +22,10 @@ multivalued. Syntax ~~~~~~ -The syntax is fairly flexible and permissive; whitespaces are mostly -ignored. The '#' and ';' characters begin comments to the end of line, -blank lines are ignored. +The syntax is fairly flexible and permissive. Whitespace characters, +which in this context are the space character (SP) and the horizontal +tabulation (HT), are mostly ignored. The '#' and ';' characters begin +comments to the end of line. Blank lines are ignored. The file consists of sections and variables. A section begins with the name of the section in square brackets and continues until the next
@@ -64,12 +65,14 @@ The variable names are case-insensitive, allow only alphanumeric characters and `-`, and must start with an alphabetic character. A line that defines a value can be continued to the next line by -ending it with a `\`; the backslash and the end-of-line are -stripped. Leading whitespaces after 'name =', the remainder of the +ending it with a `\`; the backslash and the end-of-line are stripped. +Leading whitespace characters after 'name =', the remainder of the line after the first comment character '#' or ';', and trailing -whitespaces of the line are discarded unless they are enclosed in -double quotes. Internal whitespaces within the value are retained -verbatim. +whitespace characters of the line are discarded unless they are enclosed +in double quotes. The discarding of the trailing whitespace characters +applies regardless of the discarding of the portion of the line after +the first comment character. Internal whitespace characters within the +value are retained verbatim. Inside double quotes, double quote `"` and backslash `\` characters must be escaped: use `\"` for `"` and `\\` for `\`.