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Re: Character limitations in names

 

Hi Wayne,

Yes, I was around for the quoting discussion, but this current idea was not just for spaces but for filename-illegal-characters as well.  Instead of quoting:

   this is my/filename

we could write out:

   this is my&fasl;filename

which uses XML-entity-references and doesn’t require any file-format changes.  There’s also %-encoding (commonly used in URLs) which would look like:

   this%20is%20my%2Ffilename

While neither is terribly readable, it’s a corner case and if the user really wants odd characters in their names then it’s about all we can do.

But then I ran into the ‘:’ problem.

Cheers,
Jeff.

PS: I’m still OK with the “punt” option; I just wanted to explain that it doesn’t need any file format changes.


> On 27 Sep 2018, at 17:49, Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> We cannot change LIB_IDs until the new schematic file format is
> implemented because the symbol LIB_ID is not saved as a quoted string.
> 
> In pcbnew, the footprint library name is the file name so that is all
> together different issue.  We can quote file names like urls but we
> still have to change the LIB_ID parsing and formatting to handle this in
> the board file which would effectively require a file format change.
> 
> I'm pretty sure we've discussed this as part of v6 but maybe that was
> before you joined the project.  Long story short, abandon the idea until
> all the pieces are in place to implement it correctly.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Wayne
> 
> On 9/27/2018 12:15 PM, Jeff Young wrote:
>> 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.
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