Re: [PATCH] Fixed incomplete and incorrect treatment of comments and trailing whitespace

[Dima Kogan]

Hello.

Erik Auerswald <auerswal@unix-ag.uni-kl.de> writes:

> On Sun, May 15, 2022 at 06:06:21PM -0700, Dima Kogan wrote:
>> Addresses two related issues:
>> 
>> - Comments that didn't block out a whole line weren't being properly ignored 
>> by
>>   -C. Lines such as 'bar 5#xxx' didn't ignore the '#xxx' as they were 
>> supposed
>>   to
>
> I think that would be a new feature.  The --help output states:
>
>     -C, --skip-comments       skip comment lines (starting with '#' or ';'
>                                 and optional whitespace)
>
> As far as I understand the documentation, the -C, --skip-comments option
> was intended to skip complete lines.

Huh. The docs do indeed describe the observed behavior. But this
behavior isn't how comments work anywhere else, and breaks everybody's
expectations of how comments should be interpreted. I think we should
take the patch AND we should update the docs.


> Treating any ';' in a line as starting a comment would interfere with
> using ';' as field separator.  But using ';' as field separator is common
> with simple CSV-like formats when the locale's decimal separator is a ','.

Using the comment character as the field separator shouldn't work. Does
anybody expect it to?