Re: Proposal: new border setting in psql

On Thu, 8 Jan 2009, D'Arcy J.M. Cain wrote:

> On Thu, 8 Jan 2009 13:51:44 -0500 (EST)
> Greg Smith <gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com> wrote:
>>
>> A. Einstein was a really smart dude.
> Which character in the above example would you escape.

"." is on the long list of characters to be escaped I sent out earlier.
The parser looks for all sorts of enumeration syntaxes--A., I), (IV)--but
they all require some punctuation which makes those characters the ones to
focus on.

> I would suggest that if we want actual ReST-safe output we should create
> a "border = 4" setting. The code changes would be minimal. All we need
> to do is check for a value of 4 in addition to checking whether escaping
> is necessary.

This seems like a reasonable spec to me. If you just want that general
format, you can get that and may very well end up with something that's
useful ReST anyway with the border=3 mode your existing patch implements.
As you demonstrated, there are several situations where a character you
think might do something special turns out to be ignored, with "\" being
the most likely to cause trouble.

If you really want something that will be valid ReST, use border=4, which
adds escaping for everything inside the table that's on that long list of
potential markup characters. That's going to make the table look quite
ugly if you have many characters on the escape list, but I don't see any
way to get around that without a heavy dependency on behavior that's only
documented in the docutils implementation itself. The "spec" itself is
really more of a user guide, and it sure isn't good enough to let you know
every case where special characters may be interpreted as markup. As
demonstrated with the Einstein example, you sometimes need a while line of
lookahead to figure that out anyway, which makes a smarter escaping
solution pretty hard to implement.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD