Whitespace, continuation, and quoted strings in conf files

[Russ Allbery]

Todd Olson <tco2 at cornell.edu> writes:

> I infer (and I think it is a good thing!!) that

>      param:  "line one \
>            \n line two"

> is the same as

>      param:  "line one \n line two"

Right.

> However,
> I fear that future readers of the statement

>    "leading whitespace on the next line should similarly be ignored"

> might missunderstand and feel that the digrap \n should be stripped as
> well.  To avoid that missunderstanding, perhaps the documentation should
> explicitly mention this example?????

Yeah, that's a good idea.  (It might be clearer to just say that, in a
continuation line, leading literal spaces and tabs are stripped, which I
think is clearer.)

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>