Re: git status --porcelain is a mess that needs fixing

[Julian Phillips <julian@quantumfyre.co.uk>]

On Sun, 11 Apr 2010 00:56:47 +1000, Jon Seymour <jon.seymour@gmail.com>
wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 11:35 PM, Julian Phillips
> <julian@quantumfyre.co.uk> wrote:
>> On Sat, 10 Apr 2010 00:09:59 -0400, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:
>>> Your parser is already broken if you are calling split, as the
filenames
>>> may contain spaces (and will be quoted in that case, and you need to
>>> unmangle). You should use "-z".
>>>
>>> You will probably then realize that the "-z" format looks like:
>>>
>>>   XY file1\0file2\0
>>>
>>> which still sucks. It would be more friendly as:
>>>
>>>   XY\0file1\0file2\0
>>>
>>> So you could split on "\0". But even with that, you can't just blindly
>>> split, as the column and record separators are the same, and you might
>>> have one or two filenames.
>>
>> Not true.  If the second form was used, then you _can_ split on \0.  It
>> will tokenise the data for you, and then you consume ether two or three
>> tokens depending on the status flags.  So it would make the parsing
>> simpler.  But to make it even easier, how about adding a -Z that makes
>> the
>> output format "XY\0file1\0[file2]\0" (i.e. always three tokens per
>> record,
>> with the third token being empty if there is no second filename)?
>>  Though
>> if future expandability was wanted you could end each record with \0\0
>> and
>> then parsing would be a two stages of split on \0\0 for records and
then
>> split on \0 for entries?
> 
> Surely that won't work - if file2 can be empty, \0[file2]\0 reduces to
> \0\0 which would be confused with the \0\0 proposed as a record
> separator.

Yes.  But they were alternative suggestions, so if using \0\0 as the
record marker you would omit the second filename when empty as is currently
done.

-- 
Julian