Re: need a little string hint...

[Adrien Plisson <aplisson-news@stochastique.net>]

Simon Wright wrote:
> Of course you may not be talking about DNS -- but I'm pretty sure that
> under DNS legal hostname characters are [a-z0-9.-] (case insensitive)
> which doesn't include space.

it depends: look at IDN (Internationalized Domain Names), it allows to 
have Unicode characters in domain names. it then depends if your 
configuration file should hold only the ASCII-compatible value, in which 
case my remark is invalid, or if it is allowed to hold the non-encoded 
Unicode value, in which case trimming spaces will certainly yield a 
different result from the actual hostname in the file.

> A text-based config file format that includes significant whitespace
> as you suggest and doesn't delimit it (eg, with quotes) is asking to
> be derided. Just look at make(1).

there is also a problem of incompatibility: if the configuration file is 
intended to be read by many (> 1) different softwares, they all have to 
handle spaces the same way. i don't think trimming spaces is a common 
operation on hostnames, so he had better no do it this way.

-- 
rien