On 15/08/16 02:34, Sean Leonard wrote:
Hello Knowledgeable ABNF Folks:
I have been working with RFC 5234 lately. What is the rationale (or what are
the rationales) for including SP %d32 but excluding HTAB %d9 in char-val, aka
the literal text string? I am sure that this decision was not an oversight.
It may be appreciated that the comment production is defined as WSP, which
includes HTAB.
char-val = DQUOTE *(%x20-21 / %x23-7E) DQUOTE
; quoted string of SP and VCHAR
; without DQUOTE
So that the contents of a string literal are visible and unambiguous to
a human reader - spaces and tabs look alike. For comments is doesn't
matter if the white space comprises of spaces or tabs, it doesn't change
the meaning of a comment. But for strings it's important for a human
reader to know exactly what's in them.
Regards
--
Paul Overell
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