Thread

Re: Proposal: new border setting in psql

D'Arcy Cain <darcy@druid.net> — 2009-01-08T21:37:54Z

On Thu, 8 Jan 2009 13:51:44 -0500 (EST)
Greg Smith <gsmith@gregsmith.com> wrote:
> A. Einstein was a really
> smart dude.
> 
> Is parsed as two lines of text, while:
> 
> A. Einstein was a really smart dude.
> 
> Will be treated as a single-item list.  That sort of ambiguity is quite a 

Yes, this is an issue.  I'm not even sure how to fix it.

> hindrance to machine-generation of ReST code.  As the spec itself is very 
> loose, barring a deep read of the docutils code to figure out the rules 
> that exist only via the code implementation it seems to me the only robust 
> way around it is to just escape every special character.

Which character in the above example would you escape.

The problem with escaping is that someone may want this output for
non-ReST purposes.  They may not be making themselves known now but if
we find a need later it will be hard if not impossible to make it
available in a logical way.  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.

I would still like to see some sort of plugin system for psql that
would allow filters to be created for output.  That would make this
entire discussion moot as each of us could write whatever filter worked
for them.  That's a bigger deal though.

-- 
D'Arcy J.M. Cain <darcy@druid.net>         |  Democracy is three wolves
http://www.druid.net/darcy/                |  and a sheep voting on
+1 416 425 1212     (DoD#0082)    (eNTP)   |  what's for dinner.