Whitespace, continuation, and quoted strings in conf files

[Marco d'Itri]

On Jun 26, Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> wrote:

 >just leave out the parameter entirely.  If the goal is to set the
 >parameter to the empty string, use:
 >I think this makes more sense and is more robust; the "unset" value quite
I agree.

 >The second line would be a syntax error.  You have to instead say:
 >
 >    newsgroups: "comp.*,rec.*,\
 >                 alt.*,\
 >                 ba.*"
What about removing newlines and blanks from the content of some fields?
Such a feature would make easier writing wildmat strings.

 >Lines inside a quoted string can be continued by ending them with a
 >backslash; any whitespace after the backslash before the end of the line
 >is ignored (I learned from hard experience that giving significance to
 >trailing whitespace is just asking for trouble in hand-edited files).
What about comments? Sometime I find useful writing something like:

xxx: "aaa,\	# comment
      bbb"

And how will this text be parsed?

xxx: "aaa,\
# comment
      bbb"

-- 
ciao,
Marco