Re: document status: 3028bis, body, editheader

On Mon, 2006-03-20 at 22:59 -0800, Philip Guenther wrote:
> I've made one tweak for the next rev to the wording in section 2.7.1
> regarding ':match' and the definition of 'character'; I had overlooked
> an off-list comment at the turn of the year.  The paragraph now
> reads:
>    The ":matches" match type specifies a wildcard match using the
>    characters "*" and "?"; the entire value must be matched.  "*"
>    matches zero or more characters in the value and "?" matches a single
>    character in the value, where the comparator that is used (see 2.7.3)
>    defines what a character is.  For example, the comparators "i;octet"
>    and "en;ascii-casemap" define a character to be a single octet so "?"
>    will always match exactly one octet when one of those comparators is
>    in use.  In contrast, the comparator "i;basic;uca=3.1.1;uv=3.2"
>    defines a character to be any UTF-8 octet sequence encoding one
>    Unicode character and thus "?" may match more than one octet.  "?"
>    and "*" may be escaped as "\\?" and "\\*" in strings to match against
>    themselves.  The first backslash escapes the second backslash;
>    together, they escape the "*".  This is awkward, but it is
>    commonplace in several programming languages that use globs and
>    regular expressions.
I find the description of the awkwardness of "\\" highly amusing
juxtaposed with the requirement of all tests in Sieve[1] to have the
argument :comparator "i;basic;uca=3.1.1;uv=3.2" (and the matching
"require" statement).  to be honest, I find it absurd that such verbiage
is forced upon users.  we need to find a better way.

[1] outside of the US of A, anyway.
-- 
Kjetil T.