list separator in config entries

[Oswald Buddenhagen]

On Mon, Oct 08, 2007 at 03:41:35AM +0200, Bernhard Loos wrote:
> The problem occurs on writing a list like "foo\" "bar".
> This will lead to "foo\, bar"
>
if *this* is true, the ini backend is screwed up already ...

> introduce another bad hack like double escaping backslashes in list
> entries or something.
>
what's a bad hack about this? in principle, list concatenation and value
writeout are two separate levels:

input => after concat => after ini writeout
"foo" "bar" => "foo, bar" => "foo, bar"
"foo\" "bar" => "foo\\, bar" => "foo\\\\, bar"
"foo," "bar" => "foo\, bar" => "foo\\, bar"
"foo\," "bar" => "foo\\\, bar" => "foo\\\\\\, bar"

to make things less confusing, one could choose a different escape char
for the concatenation:

"foo" "bar" => "foo, bar" => "foo, bar"
"foo\" "bar" => "foo\, bar" => "foo\\, bar"
"foo," "bar" => "foo^, bar" => "foo^, bar"
"foo\," "bar" => "foo\^, bar" => "foo\\^, bar"
"foo^," "bar" => "foo^^, bar" => "foo^^, bar"

note that ideally arbitrary structures could be serialized (e.g., lists
of structures (which would be represented as lists, too)). but then
one'd include ( and ) into the set of list construction chars, otherwise
it would lead to completely unreadable entries.

now comes the desktop entry spec. it says this:
"The multiple values should be separated by a semicolon. Those keys
which have several values should have a semicolon as the trailing
character. Semicolons in these values need to be escaped using \;."

great. obviously, it does not mandate the separation of levels i
postulated. this essentially means, that separator parsing needs to be
done at the lowest level. this means that a) more complex structures are
not possible, b) even the lowest-level api needs to deal with lists
already and c) either c1) non-list entries have to escape the separator,
too, or c2) the backend needs to keep raw values in the entry map and
only parse them when their type becomes knows when the value is
requested.

you know what? screw the desktop entry spec. just ignore this corner
case - i doubt it is relevant for .desktop files anyway. we can request
a clarification later.

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