Hello Michiel!

Saturday October 04 2014 00:16, Michiel van der Vlist wrote to Andrew Leary:

 AL>> I just dug through the code.  Currently leading or trailing
 AL>> spaces in the first 7 fields (keyword, number, name, location,
 AL>> sysop, telephone, baudrate) of a nodelist line will be removed.

 MvdV> Leading and trailing spaces, but not spaces in the middle?

In the keyword field they should cause an invalid keyword error.  In the
number, telephone, and baudrate fields, they should cause an error because
they are not digits.  I will have to look a little closer to see how the code
reacts to embedded spaces in the name, location, and sysop fields.

 AL>> The issue here is an incorrect entry with a space embedded in the
 AL>> flags field.  MakeNL has never done error checking on the flags,

 MvdV> An embedded space is a more general error than an unauthorized flag.

True.

 AL>>  which is why ERRFLAGS was developed in the first place.  I
 AL>> suppose I could add basic error checking of the flags (probably
 AL>> limited to flagging illegal characters such as spaces.)  Anything
 AL>> more extensive would probably involve rewriting ERRFLAGS in C and
 AL>> merging it with MakeNL.  That is a project that would require
 AL>> extensive amounts of time to code, test, and debug.

 MvdV> It is doable. I have build errflags functionality in my pointlist
 MvdV> assembler. It is open source...

I certainly agree that it can be done.  However, for the reasons that have
been brought up here, it isn't worth the time and effort required.  I may work
on it separately from MakeNL in the future.

 AL>> Given that some of the current ZCs refuse to use ERRFLAGS, I
 AL>> don't imagine they would want to have the equivalent added to
 AL>> MakeNL.

 MvdV> I agree.

 MvdV> Perhaps just flag any space in a line it as a warning. Or maybe just
 MvdV> forget about it. It is a rare occasion that may never happen again
 MvdV> once Joe is back home and corrects it.

I will look into flagging any entry containing embedded spaces as an error.

 MvdV> It does not seem to break anything or it would have been noticed
 MvdV> before...

True.

Andrew

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