Re: empty arg in p:exec

IMHO you need multiple contigous delimiters intact for the cases where 
you actually want explicit empty arguments.

One might also argue that argument parsing is OS and program specific 
not just implementation specific.

Some OS's dont have the concept of separate arguments directly but 
rather a single string  "command line" which the app itself parses.
Although the obvious cases of this that I know of support separate 
arguments in C and Java API's then just re-quote them under the hood to 
pass to the exe ...
( e.g. Windows ... )

I personally dont think there is a good solution anywhere between 
"Single string command line" and fully seperated args aka 
<arg>arg1</arg> ... with no shortcut syntax (to avoid the arbitrary list 
of attributes.

Quite literally (and often under appreciated)
Quoting Is Hard.

http://blog.xmlsh.org/2009/01/quoting-is-hard.html

:)

-------------------------
David A. Lee
dlee@calldei.com
http://www.calldei.com
http://www.xmlsh.org


On 3/22/2010 8:40 AM, Norman Walsh wrote:
> Initially we did the obvious thing, delimited arguments by one or more
> spaces. Then we realized that we needed to handle the case where one
> of the arguments could include a space. That meant introducing some
> sort of quoting mechanism. That in turn meant that the args shortcut
> option would have*at least*  three quoting mechanisms: single and
> double quotes per XML plus whatever we added. Then there's the
> question