Re: [exim] List construction. Whitespace is relevant?

Top Page
Delete this message
Reply to this message
Author: Philip Hazel
Date:  
To: Andreas Metzler
CC: exim-users
Subject: Re: [exim] List construction. Whitespace is relevant?
On Sun, 27 Feb 2005, Andreas Metzler wrote:

> | Leading and trailing white space on each item in a list is ignored.
> in spec.txt 6.15 I *stupidly* believed whitespace to be irrelevant in
> lists and thought that
> hostlist foo = 127.0.0.1 : ::::1
> and
> hostlist bar = 127.0.0.1:::::1
> would be equivalent.[1] However, they are not (Tested in 4.50), while
> the former works as expected the latter ("127.0.0.1:::::1") does not.


I'll improve the wording of the manual. What it means is "leading and 
trailing white space on each item in a list is ignored, after the list 
has been split up into separate items".                 --------------
-------------------------------------


In other words, spaces can be important while the splitting is
happening, in order to disambiguate sequences of colons.

-- 
Philip Hazel            University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@???      Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
Get the Exim 4 book:    http://www.uit.co.uk/exim-book