Missing newline check

[David Faure]

"cat file1.cpp file2.cpp > file3.cpp" will be broken in the contexts in which 
you don't support that file1.cpp should end with a newline.

IMHO text editors should (and most do) just ensure a newline is present at the 
end so that this all works without human intervention.

David.

On lundi 10 décembre 2018 13:47:46 CET Michael Reeves wrote:
> Thanks for the reply in my view not treating endof file as newline is a
> flaw in the standard itself. But that's not my call for a kde app. I will
> not be supporting this outside kde context with regard to source files.
> 
> On Mon, Dec 10, 2018, 6:30 AM Boudhayan Gupta <bgupta at kde.org wrote:
> > Hi Michael,
> > 
> > In Unix, text files are defined as a file containing *lines* of text [1].
> > Necessarily, this means that a character is required to signify the end of
> > line, which just happens to be the '\n' character.
> > 
> > Practically, this means certain Unix utilities, (although the GNU ones are
> > smart about this) will not count your last line, since it doesn't end with
> > a newline. GNU utilities try to sanitise your input by adding newlines
> > anyway (so the output of `printf "b\na" | sort | wc -c` is different from
> > the output of `printf "b\na" | wc -c`), and then there are countless
> > scripts out in the wild that, depending on how they're written, will try
> > to match a line using the newline character at the end.
> > 
> > In short, if it doesn't end with a newline character, by definition it's
> > not a line, and standards-compliant scripts and utilities are free to
> > ignore it.
> > 
> > Also in my private opinion, "modern" tools which don't get tripped up by
> > this are just contributing to sloppiness by developers, and also the lack
> > of awareness as to why you need a newline, and then you have devs who're
> > scratching their heads wondering why their stuff doesn't work when they're
> > forced to use one old tool that doesn't cover up for this sloppiness... so
> > the fact that Krazy is complaining loudly about this is a *very good*
> > thing.
> > 
> > Thanks,
> > Boudhayan
> > 
> > [1]:
> > http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/xbd_chap03.html#ta
> > g_03_392> 
> > On Mon, 10 Dec 2018 at 09:56, Michael Reeves <reeves.87 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Why is krazy still checking for newlines at the end of files? Modern
> >> tools don't seem to get tripped up by this.
> >> 
> >> http://ebn.kde.org/krazy/reports/kdereview/kdiff3/src/index.html


-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, http://www.davidfaure.fr
Working on KDE Frameworks 5