Re: Are spaces allowed between terms in N-Triples 1.1?

Even if spaces are optional in N-Triples, N-Triples documents are still easy
to parse, so I don't see that the quote you put forward has anything to say
about white space in N-Triples.

The second and third examples you present are not valid in N-Triples,
regardless of white space, so they certainly don't have anything to say about
white space in N-Triples.

It might have been better at the beginning to require white space after the
subject, predicate, and object of a triple in N-Triples, but given that that
wasn't required I don't see that the costs of requiring them now are worth any
minor benefits in human readability that might ensue.  Note that nothing
(except the badly written grammar for N-Triples) prevents tools from putting
single spaces after subjects, predicates, and objects.

Peter F. Patel-Schneider
Nuance Communications



On 06/29/2017 06:34 AM, Jörn Hees wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> IMO the following line from the intro of the N-Triples spec says it all: "N-Triples is an easy to parse line-based subset of Turtle"
> 
> Parsing (or even thinking about) stuff like
> 
> <foo><bar>"bla".
> :::.
> x:a :b"foo". 
> 
> is way more complicated (and by that not easy) than single space delimited RDF terms.
> 
> I'm strongly against ever encouraging the no-space form, as i really think we don't need this kind of unnecessary complication.
> 
> Also I'm a fan of good old unix tools such as sort, grep, sed... ([1] for an example).
> I'm not saying it's impossible, but without the space it's definitely more complicated and error prone.
> 
> That said: let's update the specs? (erratum / next version?)
> 
> Best,
> Jörn
> 
> [1]: https://joernhees.de/blog/2015/01/28/dbpedia-2014-stats-top-subjects-predicates-and-objects/
> 
> 
> 

Received on Thursday, 29 June 2017 14:24:41 UTC