From: Reece Dunn <msclrhd@hotmail.com>
John Torjo wrote:
Rob Stewart wrote:
Agreed, but pipes ("|") are easier to grok:
"<elem> | </elem><elem> | </elem>"
That's fine too.
This again runs into the problem of what if you want '|' in your format string? One possibility is to use non-printable characters, e.g. \xFF, but I don't think this would have widespread support.
Implementing escaping for the above will complicate the evaluation of the format string as you cannot use str.find( "|" ). One possibility is to check if '\' exists before '|' after a find; if yes, repeat. Thus '\' becomes context-sensitive. This approach leads to "< |\\| >" for "< a\\b\\c >" formatting being ill-defined.
The point is that this notation is far simpler to understand than what you currently offer in your library, so it seems like a good idea. If you accept that point, then you must choose a delimiter. Your choice of delimiter should be based upon readability and frequency of use elsewhere in the format string. Nevertheless, whichever delimiter you choose, you must allow it to be escaped because someone, somewhere, sometime will want the delimiter to be part of the text used to format the data. Pipes shine in the readability category, but are probably somewhat likely to appear in output -- for the same reason they are readable in the format string. Some other good choices are "#", "@", "!", "^", and "_". Have a look at the previous example (I've removed the spaces so the delimiters are set apart with spaces so we can see how good they really are): "<elem>|</elem><elem>|</elem>" "<elem>#</elem><elem>#</elem>" "<elem>@</elem><elem>@</elem>" "<elem>!</elem><elem>!</elem>" "<elem>^</elem><elem>^</elem>" "<elem>_</elem><elem>_</elem>" -- Rob Stewart stewart@sig.com Software Engineer http://www.sig.com Susquehanna International Group, LLP using std::disclaimer;