kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Jeff Young <jeff@xxxxxxxxx>]

I had planned to get rid of another of our nanny items (“illegal” characters in names).  The plan was to escape these strings coming in from the UI, and unescape them going out to the UI (or to canvas painting routines).

But I ran into a snag: we let you edit the FPID in the GUI, and that has the colon in it.  So there’s no way to know whether a colon coming in from that is the separator or needs to be escaped.

Things we could do:

1) abandon the idea
2) do everything but colon
3) present FPIDs unescaped in the GUI
4) something else more clever than what I’ve come up with

If we do (2) or (3), there’s also the question of the encoding system.  %-encoding is the easiest, but the least human-readable.  An entity-encoding-style syntax with our own names (cf: &forward-slash;) would be the most human-readable, but isn’t standard.  Entity-encoding using XML names (cf: &fasl;) is somewhere in between (and is what I’d lean toward).

Thoughts?

Cheers,
Jeff.