Re: delimiters between tokens in turtle

On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 11:31 AM, David Booth <david@dbooth.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 2012-02-23 at 18:01 +0100, Henry Story wrote:
>> I can't quite work out what the delimiters between tokens are.
>>
>> The following seems to be correct N3 (cwm parses it)
>>
>>   @prefix : <>.
>>   :me</knows>:her,:him.
>>
>> cwm even is able to parse
>>
>>    @prefix foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1> .
>>    :me foaf:knows:her.
>
> Ewwwww!  That's awful.  If the grammar really allows that then I
> certainly hope the grammar will be changed to require whitespace between
> tokens.

New data and new turtle writers should of course output whitespace,
and I'm not aware of any that don't. I don't see a need however to
demand that there be white space between tokens if they can be
distinguished without the whitespace.

> Note that a PrefixedName is not required to have a local name
> part, and I often take advantage of this fact in SPARQL as a way of
> defining a short name for a single long URI
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-dawg-comments/2011Sep/0004.html
> so any of the following would be legal statements given suitable prefix
> definitions:
>
>     :me  foaf:  knows:her .
>     :me  foaf:know  s:her .
>     :me  foaf:knows  :her .

These are also still perfectly valid in Turtle. Hrm, that looks like a
reasonable test case to add to the Turtle test cases as well. Or at
least something like that.

>
>
> --
> David Booth, Ph.D.
> http://dbooth.org/
>
> Opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily
> reflect those of his employer.
>
>

Received on Thursday, 23 February 2012 21:17:56 UTC