Re: [boost] [serialization] Why can't hyphens appear in NVP's?

From: Robert Ramey (ramey_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-07-18 10:11:31

Hmm, I've twiddled with the set of allowable characters from time to time on
sort of an ad hoc basis.  For some reason it never occured to me to actually
try and find the difinitive source for this.  So I suppose there are couple
of pending fine points here:

a) the exact rules for what characters are legal in which part of tag names.
This might not be all that obvious given that the html can be coded in wide
characters then to utf-8.  Also the narrow character version is coded with
the current locale so that's another story.

b) It has recently brought to my attention that wstrings with a '\0' in then
can't be part of a string variable.  Actually this raises the issue that the
current html coding escapes for html characters like '>' but doesn't do
anything special for non-printable characters.  This will require another
level of escapes - the html # syntax. Again, the resolution probably
requires considering the locale - or not.

A long time ago, strings (not tags) were coded as arrays of integers.  Thus
the problem b) above didn't occur. But it seemed inconvenient, inefficient,
and incompatible with xml idea that stuff should be sort of readable.

Sorry I can't give a better answer - but there it is.

Robert Ramey

Jonathan Turkanis wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm using the serialization library for the first time. Everything
> works pretty nicely, but I'm a little surprised that I can't use
> hyphens in the first component of a name-value pair. What's the
> purpose of this restriction? As long as the hyphen is not the first
> character of a name, it should correspond to perfectly legal XML.
>
> Jonathan
>
>
>
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