Re: [office-formula] Whitespace fixups

[Eike Rathke <erack@sun.com>]

Hi David,

On Saturday, 2008-06-14 12:20:09 -0400, David A. Wheeler wrote:

> In particular, if there is an embedded newline, do we use \n or \r?
> It explicitly forbids CRLF, but one place says "\n" and the other says "\r". I propose that it be \n (I believe that's what we meant), but exclusively use Unicode code points so that it's unambiguous.

Seconded, use "\n" line feed, written as U+000A Unicode code point.

> [... draft ...]
> Applications shall consider the following characters as whitespace
> characters: space (U+0020), tab (U+0009), newline (U+000A), and
> carriage return (U+000D).

Should we add U+00A0 NO-BREAK SPACE to this list? I don't think we'd
need the other no-break space characters though.

> An embedded line break shall be represented by a single newline
> character (U+000A), not by a carriage return-linefeed pair. When
> embedded in an XML document the newline character is typically
> represented as “&#0A;”.

Using the term typically (remember TC discussion) might need
clarification on what,when,why,which,... I suggest to avoid it and
simply remove the last sentence, leaving only the definition to use
a newline character.

So, if CR and LF are both considered whitespace characters, which
I second, and an embedded line break shall be written as LF, which
I second as well, this actually means that an application must accept
a CRLF combination when reading a document, but not write CRLF back to
a document and transform it to LF instead.

What about a single CR? Should it be treated as a newline and written
back as LF? Or should it be preserved, if the application supports that?

Note: Applications not capable of preserving all whitespace characters
should be allowed to omit them when writing a document.

  Eike

-- 
Automatic string conversions considered dangerous. They are the GOTO statements
of spreadsheets.  --Robert Weir on the OpenDocument formula subcommittee's list.

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