Re: [RFD] Expanded Pretty Format Placeholders Proposal

[Will Palmer <wmpalmer@gmail.com>]

On Thu, 2011-03-17 at 14:35 -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Will Palmer <wmpalmer@gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > On Fri, 2011-03-11 at 00:47 +0000, Will Palmer wrote:
> > ...
> >> 	%(foo-condition: %(format: %H, aka %h), %H )
> >
> > of course, this conflicts with the need to embed a literal ")" within a
> > sub-format. The simplest option for this would be to either allow %) as
> > an escape, as with %%. Even simpler, of course, would be %x29, but this
> > seems needlessly obscure. The only objection I have to %) is "It's
> > ugly". To me, %(format: "this is a paren: )") is easier to read, but
> > that would just be moving the problem around, adding the necessity of
> > the just-as-ugly-or-moreso %", or alternatively C-style \" and \\.
> > So I think that %) will be the best option.
> 
> I somehow had an impression that you will be using "" to quote strings to
> protect leading or trailing whitespaces, and if you were to support double
> quotes anyway, \" and \\ become a very natural thing to do (so does your
> "close parenthesis inside dq").

I do have double-quoted strings implemented, but in trying to break the
big-ugly-POC patch down into more-manageable changes, I questioned the
need for it when %x20 or the "magic" space-if-nonempty might do just as
well for most cases, so I took it out of the initial patch.

I admit that double-quotes do feel quite natural from a C perspective,
even if they do go against the conventions we've already established for
escaping things in pretty-formats. I'll see about adding double-quoted
string support in a single patch in the series, so it can be evaluated
independently, and accepted/rejected on its own easily.