Re: Parsing trailers

[Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Dec 23, 2018 at 11:44 PM William Chargin <wchargin@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'm interested in parsing the output of `git-interpret-trailers` in a
> script. I had hoped that the `--parse` option would make this easy, but
> it seems that the `trailer.separators` configuration option is used to
> specify both the input format (which separators may indicate a trailer)
> and the output format of `git interpret-trailers --parse`.

Yeah, but it can take many characters, not just one.
For example you might want to do something like:

seps=$(git config trailer.separators)
test -z "$seps" && seps=':'
git -c trailer.separators="|$seps" interpret-trailers --parse infile >outfile

So that the output uses '|' as a separator.

> Given that
> `trailer.separators` may contain any (non-NUL) characters, including
> whitespace, parsing the output is not straightforward.

Changing the default separator as shown above, should make it easier
to parse the result.